New M6500 Discussion Thread

I just spoke to Dell and they are arranging for a tech to come and replace some parts on my machine. I'm definitely gonna ask the tech to let me fix the laptop myself to avoid any mishandling.

 

Im yet to find a tech that wont let me do the work myself...

 

Hello,

Are you guys aware of the M6500 freezes problem?

Re: M6500 freezes - Laptop General Hardware Forum - Laptop - Dell Community

It has been mentioned in this thread, but not much.

How big is this problem in your opinion?

Thanks,

Antonio

 

I have random freeze's and just spoke to dell support.

They are coming tomorrow to replace RAM and the 3800M GPU

The freezes are so infrequent its easy to say its a Windows bug but its definately recreatable even though the build in Dell diags say its ok

 

Boot into a Linux live disc and see if it freezes. If it doesn't you have an OS/driver issue.

 

I got someone coming today. Really hoping he'd just let me do the job. I don't wanna go through another replacement.

 

Thanks Tsunade_Hime but I dual boot with OpenSUSE which also freezes.

It's also worth noting that its difficult to get it to freeze, you could boot with a live dvd and have it work for the session and not have a problem.

For me the problem is significantly aggravated by using the graphics card, ie over the course of a month i have a lot less crashes with hardware acceleration turned off in flash, and aero turned off under windows. Also running using the VESA or NV driver in place of the nvidia driver under linux decreases the frequency of the crashs.

As I explained to the Dell representative the crashs are infrequent and if i hadn't seen other people have had the same sort of issues I wouldn't have even reported it.

But the most annoying part for me is that I'm getting married in August and in its current state I can't trust my machine to work as my DJ for a few hours...

 

so i just unboxed it, playing on it right now.

main tasks i will use for this laptop is surfing the web, day trading, and watch netflix

what tests should i do to make sure this thing work properly?

surfing the web seems fine, i downloaded my day trading software and it seems to be running ok also.

what other tests should i do? cpu, graphics, memory, etc?

the extra 8 gb ram i bought from newegg haven't arrived yet, but when they do arrive, how do i check which slots are available so i can install them?

thanks in advanced

 

Well worst case scenario is you can give me your notebook.

If you've tried every driver combination and RAM you may have a bad motherboard/graphics card. Sucks to be having so many issues on a "professional mobile workstation".

 

I have an issue with my DVD burner. First time I've really tried to use it for a lot of data. I've tried burning two brands and both are recognized in Windows 7/64 and Roxio Creator DE. Both begin to burn and Roxio stops at 200-400 meg and seem to be writing at 3-5x speeds to DVD +R media of 4.7 and 8 g size. At a certain point the drive stops writing and shows an error.

I have since wasted 6 disks. Strange thing is it will burn about 10 jpg files and the disc is readable in my other machine. I did as a test though any more data brings the above issues. I am transferring raw/nef files btw.

I'm sure this has been discussed somewhere but tough to pull the relevant post with solutions that were succesful. I have never owned a machine with a "reliable" burner. My burner is the slot load HL-DT-ST-DVD+-RW GS20N. Latest firmware as well.

I am able to burn these on my workstation burner using the same 4.7g media. It is a XP/32 system and on both machines I am burning data dvds.

Thanks in advance for any helpful info.


****UPDATE.... Chatted with Dell support and a new DVD burner is being dispatched. Impressed with Dell's Precision chat line. Fast and efficient.

**** Update..... Fast delivery of part and while it is the Hitachi 10, tray loading, original version was slot load 20, works like it should. Problem solved.