Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

If you click on Start and then click on the right-pointing arrow to the right of Shutdown, a menu pops up which includes Hibernate. So, you can manually invoke hibernation without waiting.


My own search did not find many reports of your symptoms. At this point, I would reinstall Windows (if you have the skills/time) and/or contact Dell support.

Reinstalling the OS (and apps, settings, documents, etc.) can be time consuming. Some owners underestimate the admin skills/knowledge required to do it. If you decide to take this route, make frequent back ups and test for the problem frequently as you build/configure the laptop. You could always purchase a spare hard drive; this would enable you to rebuild the operating system/software at your leisure (by swapping drives).

Good luck.

 

Been using it for it for a while now... Happy about most things. Performance is great. One thing that bothers me is that every time I close the lid the screen is all black when I open the lid again. I have turned of the hibernation on closing lid so computer remains on. I guess it just turns of the screen when lid is closed. This is fine but when I open the lid it does not matter what I do. I can see and move the mouse cursor but screen is all black. It remains all black until I hit Ctrl + Alt + Del. When I do that I get the options:
-Lock this computer
-Log off
-Change Password
-Start Task Manager
- Cancel
If I select Cancel I get the screen and all running programs back. Anyone had this? Using Nvidia 258.96 with the 880 card.

Regards JN

 

At this point, Reinstalling is the last thing I want to do right now. A reinstall is going to take the better portion of a few days, and, as a full-time student, I can't afford the lost study time, especially with exams every few weeks.

I have, however, documented everything that occurs when installing/building, and I believe I started noticing this problem after an instance of connecting a DisplayPort to HDMI cable to an HDTV just to test the function. I remember the messing around with projection settings, and how the Sony HDTV, labeled 1080p, defaulted at 720p when showing my desktop. I don't know if this may have been the cause of the issue, but I might as well talk about it, because it seems like important information to disclose.

Dell support isn't much help either, as most of the issues that I called them about, I had to figure out how to solve them myself. I can't stand the condescending tone of the support team, and they will refuse to acknowledge that a problem exists when there clearly is one.

I consider myself to be very skillful with computers, and this is my third reinstall on this machine, with each process taking at least 12-24 hours to completion. As of now, this (and a bug in the AcceleratorP11 A02 Drivers causing sata devices to refuse to unmount, causing parts of windows to stall, having to revert back to A01) is the only issue I see, and I honestly think that this issue can be solved without having to reinstall.

I've found a few resources from people with the same problem (some with different machines), and I will try to work from there in order to fix this annoyance.

 

Ok, I just opened an elevated command prompt and entered "powercfg -H on" and set my computer to force hibernate. I then closed the lid and left it alone for about a minute, and opened it back up, and to my surprise, all my application windows are in tact now. I will continue to test this and see what happens when the system goes into hibernation by itself from sleep.

 

I did not see in your previous posts that you had already reinstalled the OS. Prolly my poor reading skills. Sorry. Just trying to help identify options...

 

It's all good. I'm very grateful for your help so far.

 

I wondered if the hiberfil.sys file was corrupt or the drive has a bad block, leading to hibernation weirdness. That's why my previous procedure had you delete and rebuild the file.

Win 7 usually deletes hiberfil.sys when hibernation is disabled. But, if you find the file still exists after disabling hibernation, rename it to hyberfil.sys.BAD so those drive blocks won't be reused.

Your operating system partition (drive) might have some bad blocks. Might be worthwhile to check using a utility which works offline.

 

I doubt that there are bad blocks, or else I would have already known. However, I will still scan and check just to be on the safe side. I'm still observing to see if anything comes up again.

As an unrelated side note: the touchpad/pointing stick drivers are finally getting better.

 

Looking at getting an M4500 and am debating on processors. Choice is between the i7-840QM and the i7-640M.

Research seems to suggest:

The 640 is newer tech, with higher clock and lower TDP.

840 is quad core, faster memory, larger cache.

Price is not an issue.

Any thoughts? Anything else I'm not considering?

 

Clock rate is not as different as it seems on paper. Quad Core i7 has automatic "Turbo Boost" (no drivers required) that sends the clock rate up when only 1 or 2 cores are busy and the chip is still within its thermal budget.

So quad core performance should be better all-around by quite a bit. Faster memory and larger cache help, too.

The 840 in one of the newest Intel CPUs, btw. After long consideration, I am in the order process now (call Dell, get quote, laugh at them, renegotiate) and will probably get my system in October - the i7-840M CPU is the one I decided on after quite a bit of research.