Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

You should first do your best to confirm that the RAM you added in is good, before worrying about the GPU. Bad RAM can cause strange things to happen that don't point you to it right away. Though, I have personally observed both hard lock and the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL blue screen error message with bad RAM in the past.

Run MemTest86 for a few hours and see if it spits out any errors. (Any errors are bad.)

I know it seems like new RAM should be fine, but this recently bit me. I was having some rather strange issues on a machine and I was checking all sorts of things, it took me a while to decide to run a memory test and then... what do you know... bad RAM.

 

This made me look in my pile of WiFi cards that I had removed from various Latitude laptops during the years to replace with AC cards.
I found one Ultimate N-6300
Should I connect the the middle wire (silver color) or it doesn't matter?

 

You have to connect all three antennas to get 450 Mbps speed (if your access point supports it). Two antennas will get you just 300 Mbps.

 

Oh never knew what that third antenna was for. Thanks.
Installed it and all is good.

 

Should not be a GPU problem if it works fine with 8GB. At worst, it's a GPU + 32GB problem. I would first try the system with each possible combination of 2x8GB sticks, see if it works this way. You might have one (or more) bad stick(s) among the four. I would also try with the original 2x4GB sticks in the other two slots. Maybe you have one (or more) bad slot(s).

If everything works fine under all these scenarios, I have no other suggestion than that, perhaps, the system has an issue with 32GB... Change bioses, Quadro drivers; lots of things to try but little hope...

BTW, I assume the memory is of the 1.5v variety, not the low-voltage 1.35v kind?!

On a side note, my E7440 does not work with two A-Data 4GB sticks which work fine on other 3 laptops they were tested on. It works perfectly well with Hynix memory, though. Never thought such things still happened.

 

I took the advice, and ran the memtest86 for about 20 hours. There were 0 errors. But, I'm glad I did that, because I was able to rule out the RAM as a problem.

Then I called the Joy Systems tech support again. That's the company that supports refurb. Dells purchased through Walmart.com, which is where I bought my m4600. They are really good at answering the calls, but couldn't fix the problem. Their solution was to re-install the video driver. I tried all that to no avail.

I was about to give up when I found a thread somewhere that suggested re-routing a video channel in the BIOS. That made absolutely no sense to me - meaning I didn't have a clue what the author was talking about, but it did spark an idea. I had recalled reading before that the Intel SpeedStep technology can cause problems. So, I decided to disable that, and the C-mode sleep setting.

I rebooted and BAM! No more problems. I then set the BIOS back to default settings to test and still no more problems.

I'm not a hardware engineer so I'm not really sure exactly what I did to fix the problem. But, if I had to guess I'd say that by telling the BIOS to make a change, it apparently reconfigures itself to match the existing hardware - which in this case was changing the RAM from 4GB-Kingston to 32GB-Crucial. Maybe it takes care of re-routing channels and whatever other configurations need to change.

So, in the end, it was not a video card problem but a BIOS problem, and by just making a change to the BIOS it was able to fix itself.

Now, I'm cautiously optimistic. I don't want to celebrate too much for fear of jinxing my fix. But, I've been using the system for a week now, and not a single shut down. I've even ran through a complete system restore after a failed 196-upgrade Microsoft upgrade. And, now I'm all upgraded, and life is good with a very fast laptop that I can use to create a whole slew of SharePoint server VMS. Yay!

 

Can anyone confirm if the heatsink for the nvidia 2000m will work for the firepro 5100?

 

Question: I have upgraded to Windows 10 on my Precision 4600 and everything seems to be working well... except the DC card. No matter what drivers I try to find for it, I always get an error that "O2mdfw8x64.inf" was not found. Has anyone else found drivers that work or a workaround to get the cardreader working in Windows 10?

 

Do you mean SD card?

Did you try loading the Windows 8.1 drivers? Microsoft might have bumped the version to NT 10, but most NT 6.x (Vista/7/8) should work -- sans video (which is release-specific).

Although there have been some issues with imaging, network (especially those with HBA-like features) and even storage (especially USB). Microsoft changed the driver subsystem for both mid NT 6.x releases.

You could try hacking the INF file and adding the Windows 10 string for NT 10. That might work and let it load. You might need to clear out the existing INF files though, as Windows caches/saves a copy for existing drivers, after you unload.

 

I'm sort of surprised that is an issue at all, unless the card reader in the M4600 is much different than that in the M4700/M4800, as on those generations Windows loaded a "generic" driver for the card reader with no hassle. (This is with a custom Windows image, I've never used the Dell-provided ones which may have also included a separate driver.) It shows up in device manager as "SDA Standard Compliant SD Host Controller" and the driver vendor is Microsoft. The INF file is "sdbus.inf".

Does this one show up as an option if you...
Go to device manager - Find SD card reader - double-click - Driver tab - Update Driver button - "Browse my computer..." - "Let me pick from a list..."
?