M6400 Covet crashing in Maya

I wonder if that's the problem. My previous system was Vista Business 64 (the one I returned to HP because it got stuck in indefinite repair). The M6400 is Ultimate 64.

I have a friend in class who is supposedly running it just fine in Vista Ultimate 64, but what's funny is he started with Ultimate and then used V-Lite to remove all of the Ultimate features. Maybe something about Media Center kills media apps? (Would be ironic! The content viewer kills the content creators' software?)


Anyway, here's an update on the stability:
With the power saving profile set to High Performance, I was able to work for two days without any crashing. The last time it crashed was before the weekend, and I checked the power profile and that PCI Express setting was set to something other than Off. When I was working these past few days I was working pretty solidly for maybe 4-5 hours between breaks. So at very least, setting the laptop to "Max Performance" profile makes things go more smoothly, if not eliminates the problem altogether.

Aaaaaand now I get to try and figure out why Adobe Audition, AfterEffects, AND Premiere Pro CS3 all hard-lock the system as soon as I start them, making me hold down the power button for 4 seconds. (Was a nice little surprise when it was time to take in my rendered frame sequence and compress it into QuickTime!) My friend with the stripped-down Vista Ultimate says all of these open fine on his system too, so I am going to try reinstalling without UAC on and see if that helps. All of those programs also ran properly on the HP with Vista Business 64.

 

Ahh, so that simply says it's supported on Vista Business. All this means is that that is the OS they tested it on, it says nothing one way or the other on other flavors of Vista. As far as software compatibility is concerned, there are no differences between the Business and Ultimate versions, and least of all should there be crashes on one version but not on the other. The kernels are identical, and so are all the libraries and components; the only difference is that ultimate comes with a few additional pieces of software.

 

O.k., so it's the PCI Express power management that causes the issue; that, on the other hand, is a clear indicator of a driver problem. You should talk to Dell Tech Support about it (I assume you have Gold support), to make them aware of the issue (if they are not already), so they can fix it asap.

Again, driver or hardware issue. Just for kicks, you could try taking out one of your memory modules, and swap modules out to see if that helps. In my experience, memory tests hardly ever detect problems with RAM, even when bad RAM causes crashes.

But, if you have problems with system crashes, this is the kind to wish for: One that can be reproduced reliably, so you can easily test various configurations options, and immediately assess their effect.

Good luck on your quest! I should be getting my Covet (Vista Ultimate 64, QX9300, 3700M, 16gigs RAM) today. I haven't ordered the CS4 suite yet, but I'll probably install it over the holidays. I'll come back here to report if I have the same issues...

P.S.: The FedEx guy just came in to bring me my new machine.

 

Good, that means a fix is probably on the horizon, or at least that fiddling with nonstandard drivers from laptopvideo2go has some promise. Unfortunately it also means that a different machine would probably have the same problem.

Maybe since NVidia has released a new WHQL driver, there will be an alternative officially supported driver soon.

 

i haven't done a whole lot in Maya. I will update to the SP1 soon. I do have Vista Business x64 because the M6400 config and Dell said Ultimate x64 would not work with 2 HD's w/o RAID.
Maya seemed ok and did not crash at all so far. I am using a BT mouse.

 

Yeah I'm playing with Maya 2009 on the Covet and it hasn't crashed yet - but I haven't done hours of sustained work yet either. Mudbox 2009 crashes spectacularly, within moments of loading.

I asked about trading Ultimate for Business just for the hell of it, and they said no can do. Sending me a $50 coupon apparently.

 

Thanks for the feedback! Can you guys try Maya with your laptops set to a power saving profile and not Max Performance? I think that is what was causing the crashes for me. Either that or it could have something to do with Ultimate.

 

this is because the 3700m series quadro cards are ALSO defective like the early2008 models

see:


http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquir...g94-reportedly

http://www.theinquirer.net/gb/inquir...55nm-parts-bad
yr getting the "nvidia display stopped working and has succesfully recovered" and nvlddmkm driver error ? thats a defective nvidia card.

 

i was about the buy it with xp64, 16gb, dual 500gb 7200rpm drives, core 2 quad extreme, quadro 3700m but i think im changing my mind now, cos red hat Linux is NOT supported on the m6400

 

"I watched the issue for a while and found out that the "invalid hash on tcpip.sys" error always comes immediately before the nvidia drivers crashing."

i think thats vista sp2 telling u theres a problem with the card..