New M6500 Discussion Thread

Gak!

I had a freeze yesterday. However, this is the first one since installing the hotfix on 11/30. I used to get about two-to-three freezes a week. So this seems to have helped.

I am wondering, given my history of not having one freeze on this thing till May/June... if this freeze is caused by a Windows Update.

 

I had my first two freezes on my M6500 and was able to track down and address the cause on my machine. The issue was with GPU acceleration with flash playback. I have not tried rolling back my version of Flash 10.1 or my video drivers, I just disabled GPU acceleration in flash and all is fine now.

My Alienware M17X R1 also has the same lockup issues with Flash 10.1 and the newest Nvidia drivers, so I don't think its an M6500 thing.

I also am seeing issues when switching from 40hz (power saving) to 60hz mode on the LCD panel when video is being encoded in Adobe Live Media Encoder 3.1.

 

I am installing Windows 7 x64 on my M6500 on a Raid 0 array with two Intel X25-M 160GB SSD drives.

What is the recommended stripe size for the array, 64kB or 128kB? I thought I read long time ago that 64kB was best, but I have now been told by Dell tech support that 128kB is better

Thanks,

Antonio

 

I am about to install the O/S on my M6500 with two Intel X25-M 160GB drives.

The drives, according to the label, read "Pack Date: 09/14/10", that is they are about 3 months old.

I cannot easily source a CD-R disc to run image the Intel SSD firmware utility.

Can I safely assume that my drives already have the latest firmware? Will they be any performance drawback if I later find out that I need to upgrade the firmware?

Thanks,

Antonio

 

Anyone?

 

Biggest potential drawback is that a lot of drive firmware updates released by drive manufacturers are destructive. Meaning you'll end up reinstalling/re-imaging your os and data post update.

Find out now instead of assuming. It's in your best interest.

 

I didnt backup the recovery partition of my system.

I need the dell precision background pictures,
could anyone upload the files?

thanks

 

Good news with my m6500. It's been two weeks since the last freeze, I've had it running flat out 24 hours a day. I've gone from half a dozen bsod's and freezes a day to a perfectly stable system.

To get to this I've had to:

Buy 16gb RAM from Crucial with slightly slower timings (this stopped the memory management BSOD's, I had been using slightly faster Samsung modules).

However I was still getting the blank screen and random freezes so...

Powermizer installed which had a significant effect followed by the hotfix detailed on here. What do you know? A perfectly stable system, just in time to replace it with the m6600 next month so I can start all over again!

 

2 rules:

1. The computer you "really" want will always be over 4K dollars

2. Drivers and Memory are the culprit

 

Very wise.

Please post the specs of these Crucial modules. Thanks.