New M6500 Discussion Thread

Yes you can upgrade to the i7 later, however if you buy a M6500 with only a dual core processor they will give you a system board with only two RAM slots and not the promised 4 Look it up in the system manual available online. It's a small note in the specifications page. I ended up getting one with an i5 and had to send it back after I opened it up to drop in my 3rd and 4th RAM chip and realized that the slots were not there.

 

Hi Folks,

I couple months back I got a M6500, pretty much loaded: i7-940xm, 16GB aftermarket RAM, FX3800M, RGBLED, one 256GB Crucial SSD, and one 7200rpm 500GB HDD - all a pretty penny. It replaced a fine M90 XPx32 laptop with Office 2002. I use a computer all day long, but ain't no IT guy.

This is much more a Win7 / Office 2010 issues and question than hardware, but I'm not sure where to turn. The whole thing can pause and hang for a minute between basic operations, especially when using Outlook and internet browsing, but also other basic programs such as Excel. Where do I turn to try to figure out how to streamline this thing? I followed SSD installation clues from other posts here and ran some benchmark with equivalent results as others.

Programs used: Office 2010, Solidworks CAD, Photoshop/Lightroom CS5, IE8, Chrome. The primary Outlook PST file is currently 1.7GB and I have three archive PSTs up to 1.5GB. Played with zero virtual memory on the SSD and 1-16GB on the HDD. Ask away about anything else to check.

Not sure what to do to make thing thing run as well my old XP laptop. In the meantime, it wasn't a very good use of money, especially that SSD.

Thanks - Ralph

 

Anyone been having problems with the USB 3.0 ports causing blue screens? I got one the other day and unfortunately the Dell provided driver is old and there are not any directly available from NEC on their website. I did find an updated driver, however and apparently, the Dell provided driver is as old as the dinosaurs. I will check this out and post again in a week or so to let everyone know how well it works.
Location is here: SONY/NEC firmwares
Model is: µPD720200

 

Thanks for the heads up on the 2 slots for i5 orders. I should still be able to get 8 gb with two slots though. Is there any other advantage to four slots besides capacity?

 

Not that I am aware of. Other users may have some more information. I do know that in the specifications document it does say that you can have DDR3 1600 speed RAM but at a lower capacity which I think is 8GB max. However, I believe you need the quad core CPUs to use DDR3 1600. Check the service manual on Dell's website. Also, if you get a system with a quad core, you might get a system board with USB 3.0 That couldn't hurt your resell value down the line.

Also, if anyone wants to know, so far so good with the new drivers. No bluescreens yet. The old drivers were dated in the device manager from 2009 lol. Very pathetic, you really can't depend on manufacturers to keep this stuff up to date seeing as the new ones that I have are dated 30th September 2010.

 

Hey Ralph, did you do a clean install when you got the machine? I think most people here would agree that a clean Windows install really helps. Also, that pausing does sound similar to other older SSD models that I have seen in action. Is your SSD the Dell builtin one? There are firmware updates for those on the website.

 

Griff_ga,

I ordered the M6500 with the smallest cheapest Dell HDD and removed it to install the SSD & HDD purchased elsewhere... so yes I did a clean install. I downloaded the current drivers from Dell's support website in the process.

Today I adjusted for more minimal Visual Effects in Performance options but don't expect that to make a big difference.

I should say that *often*, on a daily basis, I get the swirling circle that the process is taking too long. Sometimes I get a Windoze message about it.

The SSD is naturally the boot drive. Should I have no paging file there, or a small 1MB one?

 

Hi Ralph,

I was having similar problems (particularly with Outlook for some reason). A quick check of the Event Viewer and I found I was getting about 30 errors a day for iaStor0 "did not respond within the timeout period". I'd get a frozen system for 1-2 minutes then it'd come back to life. After a bit of googling I took some advice and I downloaded the latest drivers directly from Intel here, and the problem has since stopped (touch wood). Try checking your event viewer to see if you're having issues with iaStor0 and perhaps try drivers directly from Intel, if so.

I'm still experiencing the "other" freezing problem (where the whole system just freezes indefinitely and you need to power off to recover) but this at least stopped the momentary freezing issues.

Hope this helps.

 

Like littleblackduck suggested, it's usually better to get the drivers straight from the source when you can such as in this case getting the storage drivers from Intel. For an SSD, there are potentially tons of things to check out. As with any newer technology it may take more pampering to get it right before the devices are dummy proof enough to go completely mainstream. Some things you might want to check are:

1. Do you have the latest firmware for your SSD? If not, update it
2. Do you have the latest SATA chipset or storage drivers? If not, update them
2. Does your SSD support TRIM? If not, know that you may need to obtain a "wiper or cleaning" utility from the manufacturer and set it to run once a week or so
3. Is your SSD partition aligned properly? If not, you need to repartition and use the proper 4K sector alignment
4. Is the windows defrag utility off? If not, turn it off

I hope this helps with your detective process of figuring out what is going on. SSDs can deliver amazing performance, but only if they are configured properly.

 

Just to add to this... BACK UP YOUR DRIVE before you update the firmware... many (like me) got burnt when Intel had buggy firmware available for their X-25M's; luckily I had backups of everything that was on the bricked drive.