New M6500 Discussion Thread

I had that rather than the freezing, RAM/GPU replacement sorted it. One of those was the problem.

 

Is there any test (software) to find where the problem comes from? Dell diagnostic CD?

 

Yes, Dell has the Diagnostics software to burn on a CD on the download page. Tests all kinds of stuff.

 

Hi,

this is me again with those internal/external screen issues. As nobody here has been able to to confirm that the M7820 is able to do higher external vga refresh rates than 60Hz, I might consider looking at a worthy successor to my old 21" CRT.

A 27" or 30" screen would be nice if the M7820 in the M6500 is able to do 2560x1600 or 2560x1440 (extended desktop to the internal LCD). Has anybody been able to test these resolutions? Thanks in advance!

 

My problem was not picked up by on boot diagnostics, memtest86, tools on the dvd but it all passed.

My problem was odd BSOD's even on clean loads of windows and an approximately once a week drop to a black screen with vertical lines.

I was living with it until i saw the Dell community forum with people having the same problem.

Touch wood almost a week and on the same boot! Woot!

 

Hmm interesting. May I ask what programs you are running that use, alter, or configure the GPU? (I mean any programs like games, monitoring software, CAD programs that utilize GPU acceleration, etc etc)

Wait by clean installs on Windows do you mean windows installed, no other programs?

Also check under the BIOS, they have some monitoring software encoded into the BIOS in case of errors. While it won't catch many errors, it watches some critical ones like power/thermal issues.

 

By clean install i mean an untouched windows 7 x64 from technet, and all official dell drivers. Then simply GPU accelerated flash was enough to get a freeze or crash to black with horizontal bars. Also Windows Media Player sometimes caused it. (other programs occasionally caused but so randomly it was impossible to highlight another reliable method of recreating the problem)

To make sure it wasn't the dell drivers I did another clean install, let windows update put in the most of the drivers and got my nvidia driver from laptopvideo2go. Same issue.

On top of that I'd get far less frequent freezes too, almost at random. (And this was over the course of 13 months)

All in all it could take up to an hour of playing flash movies to recreate the problem once and at other times it'd crash successively several times.

Annoyingly a 3 hour game of Starcraft 2 here and there never crashed in game.

The major problem with all of this was that in a given month I may have had as few as 10 crashes / freezes / lockups so I thought, well perhaps its just a buggy BIOS or something, i'll wait for A05.

I had used Sandra / PCWizard and other tools and temperatures were not normally any hotter than 55 degrees on the CPU and 45-50 degrees on the GPU.

To sum up, RAM and GPU replacement = 6 days uptime without a problem running photoshop, starcraft 2, WMP and flash movies so I'm happy.

I'm so glad Dell took what could have been an almost impossible to prove problem and acted on it. It was quite possible should they have sent an engineer to recreate the problem in an allocated hour time slot it may have not been able to recreate the problem.

To your other point I was unaware of the BIOS options other than the on boot diagnostics... Could have been interesting to see if there was anything notable.

 

The M6500's BIOS is quite decent in terms of monitoring/features, etc.
That's an interesting issue, sounds like bad hardware on the GPU for handling 2D graphics perhaps, I forget what the difference in GPU resources used in 2d and 3d graphics.

 

For months now I've had no access to the Catalyst Control Centre and therefore no way of interacting with graphics performance.

Problem began when I recieved computer, the control centre worked but it showed everything twice, within the same program that is. So I uninstalled thinking it would be easy to reinstall and fix. The program has reinstalled, and appears to sit there quite happily (and I have uninstalled and installed around 10 times to try fix this). Only when I try to start the control centre an hourglass shows for a moment and then nothing.

If I right click on desktop I get the CCC option at the top. Same response as above though. Essentially it will not open. Everything seems to be the way it should be only CCC will not open! Infuriating.

If you have any idea what the problem might be, please tell!!!

 

This has happened to me before on other computers (laptop and desktop).
If you can go to the Start menu and maneuver to the CCC folder and look for "Restart Catalyst Control Center" or something like that. Run it. It should start it. If it does start then go to start, on the search bar type in: Msconfig. Make sure all ATI services/start up programs are selected to start.

If it does not start, download and install driversweeper below, do a complete removal of CCC (uninstall all ATI software), then restart in safe mode and run DriverSweeper to remove all CCC remnants. Proceed to install CCC again. Guru3D - Driver Sweeper
Edit: Almost forgot, be sure to redownload the CCC installation setup to remove any variables.