M15x Problem/Technical Question thread

I dont't know if they do or don't as I've always worked on my laptop myself.

 

Ah alright, thanks. I guess I'll find out this Monday

 

If they are sending you a tech to change out both heatsinks, then yes they HAVE to redo the paste and possibly thermal pad.

 

Thanks for the info!! That's a relief

 

I am about to dual-boot my m15x on windows 7 32-bits, but I have noticed on the dell drivers page that all drivers for the m15x are for windows 64 bits...

Am I going to have trouble finding the basic drivers for windows 7 32-bits?

Also has anyone done this before and can speak a few words of advice?

Thanks

 

Does that happen when you put your service tag in or just when you navigate by selection options to the drivers

 

The M15x was realeased with only x64 OS.
I'm not sure if all drivers will install under your x32 environment but you can always give it a try. Either install them with the provided .exe or thru Device manager.

 

Hey all,

I'm a longtime lurker of this forum, and many of the guides have helped me to get 4 great years out of my (aging) M15x. I'm on a mission to convert it into an HTPC media machine/streamer but have run up against some really frustrating technical issues.

After 4 years of running Vista and pretty much stock drivers without too many issues, I looked to give the machine a boost by restoring it back to factory setting with the Alienrespawn partition and then updating the graphics and chipset drivers for better performance.

However, no matter which set of drivers I use past the stock 167 drivers that came with the laptop back in 2008, the GPU causes bluescreen crashes within an hour of booting up! I've tried drivers from the present dating back to 2009 from nvidia, and nothing works! I'm really even only able to run a stable machine with the setting pretty much as they are out of the box.

Even with this setup, my machine isn't performing like it should. When all is well, it's doing a great job of running XBMC and associated programs. However, I still encounter:

- Lockups that force a hard restart
- Endless loops at the login screen after password entry
- Crashes that occur overnight (I'll wake up or come home to a login screen and a windows error report after login)

What I can't understand is how this stuff is happening even after a total restore to factory settings. After the factory restore, I installed XBMC and Java before getting my first lockup. I'd like to nuke and pave my way up to Windows 7 x64, but my first attempts at that resulted in immediate blue screens from both Intel wifi and nividia GPU drivers. I'm willing to keep the machine at Vista if necessary since it runs fine when it's not frozen or crashing p)

Any advice? I'm willing to offer any information and do whatever it takes to get my precious gaming laptop back! I've loved this thing dearly for years and I don't want to see the death of such a big investment.

Thanks so much in advance.

 

The inside of my power jack broke, and i have to move the adapter around to make it charge. I was looking for a replacement DC jack, but i couldn't find any similar to mine on ebay, googling it didnt help either.
The DC jack i have is Foxconn 082BB. Where do you get replacement DC jacks for M15x?
I can upload pictures later.

 

Anyone, has any idea where could i get the correct DC-jack?

 

Search M15x dc jack on ebay, comes up with plenty of em and they are cheap

 

Yes,but none of them is like the one i need.




sorry for the bad quality



this is what i got, wich is lightyears away from being the correct one.

 

Wipe it clean and install windows 7 64 bit. That will give you a massive boost in performance over vista.

Also it gives you a clean slate in terms of drivers. You should have no problem installing the latest drivers and having them work as they should.

You must also check your vents and cpu/gpu fans for dust clogging them up. If things are overheating this will be a major cause of lockups and crashes!

 

Hi, I have a problem, my cd-rom does not read certain discs. He sees them, but does not read. I don't have a problem with the CDs on which video games are - there everything is okay, but does not read the disc for example - CD-R 700 MB Fujifilm, on which I have only four photos. Once again, I repeat - He sees a disc, but does not read. Thanks for your help.

 

Hello all,

I tried to replace my DVD drive by a Blu-Ray drive yesterday. The model should fit since it is a CA30N (the seller told me it was a LG but it actually looks like it is unbranded, "product of China" "March 2012" "ATAK7N0 CA30N").

While disassembling my computer using Dell's guide to remove the optical drive, I somewhat broke the connector and the latch on the motherboard that is used to connect the ExpressCard cable. I had troubles opening the latch, put too much force into it, and a few "pins" of the connector on the motherboard moved a little bit (not even by half a millimiter, but you can see that four or five pins are not aligned anymore). A plastic part that should hold the latch on the connector is also cracked.

I put the new Blu-Ray drive into its location, it went smoothly to tighten all the screws, the new optical drive sits perfectly.

Then I put back together the whole laptop, tried to plug the ExpressCard cable in it is damaged motherboard connector as best as I could. Now, when I power on the laptop, I have no display whatsoever.

The keyboards and all the other lights are correctly lit (even the Alien head is), the fans are running normally, but the optical drive does not seem to respond for instance. Pressing the lit eject button doesn't produce any sound when the drive is empty. Moreover, I have tried to put a CD-R into it, but the eject button doesn't work either, the disk is now stuck into the drive. The drive seemed to try to read the disk however, it was spinning and made some normal noise when the disk was inserted.

Could it be that the broken Express Card connector prevents the laptop from booting properly? Or could it be that the drive is not recognized (the eject button doesn't work) or even faulty?

Many thanks in advance,
Dakeryas.

EDIT: Ok, I have very good news for me: it was just that I had badly put back the two memory modules! I am writing from my M15x now !

Last time I repasted, I had badly put back one memory module, resulting in the computer going up to the BIOS, but with both badly inserted, you will have no display whatsoever!

Conclusion: the damaged motherboard Express Card doesn't prevent the computer from working otherwise. The BD drive is working as well and EAC, Foobar and Everest recognize as HL-DT drive, even though the sticker only shows an unbranded product of China!

Conclusion 2: no display, no working keyboard, no tray slot loading => double-check your memory slots!

 

Hello

I buy an SSD 128gb ADATA on my m15x and i have a message with FREEFALL DATA PROTECTION.

It's good to leave ON this or OFF ?

Thanks

 

halo,im nb,i have a pig problem with my new adapter

When i use 150w adapter,vga core lock run at 550,i can OC if i want

But when replace with 210w adater,vga core lock just run at 383,cant OC,fps when i play game too low

Sorry for my bad English

Help me,thanks you

 

Is this with a GTX 260M? What CPU do you have?

Can you still use the 150W adapter?

Look in BIOS to see if it detects 210W adapter.

 

gtx 260m,i7 740

Yes,150w still in use but had problem with cable,rubber cover of cable broken

210w in bios show Unknow...

 

I think you can enable it some how. In BIOS are there any selection choices i.e. [ENABLE] [DISABLE] etc?

You can use insulating electrical tape to cover the cable?

 

i dont know,just bought from another guy,can you explan it for me

Yes,i can use electrical tape but it doesn't nice and 150w's temp too hot

another help ?

 

i have a problem with my alienware m15x, basically, i just installed a gaame and noticed FPs issues in another game, previously running at 197 (highest i'd seen) i was curious as to why it was now running at 30 maximum, so i noticed the game i recently installed, had also installed a program, but i couldn't get rid of it without a system restore, after completing the system restore i noticed that after the whole windows screen, it went to the backlight, and all youc an see is my mouse button, i've waiting for over half an hour testing the -safe mode, -safe mode with networking - safe mode with command prompt, and even regular windows, and nothing seems to work, get back to me asap, the holidays are almost over.

 

Hi, I own an Alienware laptop m15x.

I would appreciate if you guys know what's wrong with my laptop.
Here is the problem:

Hi, I would like to know what happen if I could not start my m15x? Plugged in but can't on. When plugged in , the monitor behind logo got light as usual. The battery could stil charge. This happens after I clean my fans.

Possible to be motherboard problem?

Thanks in advance.

 

Do caps lock or number lock indicators start flashing when you boot? It could be the video/graphics card if there is no display.

 

Hi, thanks for your reply. It does not display anything. It could not power up. The alien head indicator does not lit

 

What about your power cable? Do you have the blue light on the plug? Try removing the battery and removing the CMOS battery (take bottom cover off and pull small black coin battery out) then holding down the alien head button for 30 seconds.
Put CMOS battery and normal battery back in and power up.

 

My power cable has light on it. I have done the drain test and the CMOS battery step. It still does not power up

 

You may have damaged a component such as graphics card which is now shorting the system meaning it won't power up.
Try removing the graphics card and powering on. If it powers on but beeps or caps lock/num lock start flashing then at least you know its the graphics card that is burnt out,

 

Ok thanks. Will try that later and update.

 

By the way, when I cleaned my fan, I did not touch my graphic card. Does that possible of my card problems? I have not try to remove the card yet

 

I had the graphic card removed and try to turn it on but it does not starts. I on the laptop without putting the graphic heat sink. There is no lights except for the AC adapter and the alien head logo behind the monitor. The start button does not lit

 

Hi, i have a M15x with nvidia 260m GPU. Having the weirdest issues with it. The performance in no two boots is the same (stealth mode disabled always). Might not make it to windows desktop for atleast 10mins or just 10secs other time. Though, regardless of the cpu clock rates, even simple things like typing and opening a new menu for the first time or any changes from the norm results in a hard lag for 2-5secs (everything freezes). Games are hell with these freezes coming every 10secs (runs at 60fps when not frozen). CPU and GPU benchmarks show everythings running fast. Initiation of any new process seems to be causing freezes (atleast what i get from it). Anyone else have these issues? Would sure like to know more abt it. And also, this is a used one with only the harddrive being a differnt (some toshiba hd), but tested the hard drive and its pretty fast (with HD Tune Pro).

 

So, I just bought a new battery for my Alienware m15x, I upgraded my GPU getting the GTX 660m installed modded and working, however a few days later I was using my laptop on battery just browsing the web no heating issues and everything went great, until my laptop just shut down for no reason. I thought the battery died but when I checked the battery is at 69% (it still is) I plug in the charger and boot it up and it boots up fine and says it's charging. I check a couple hours later and see it's still 69%. I turned off my laptop and left it to charge over night. Checked in the morning still at 69%. I decided to turn it off, do a CMOS reset, BIOS reset and leave it off for a couple of ours then put it to plug in, the lights indicate that it's still charging and well... it's not actually charging. anyone ever came across this? does anyone seem to have a fix for this?

 

I swear I made an account here before, but oh well.
I currently have an simple issue with my Alienware M15x.
I un-installed the microphone driver unintentionally and I cannot chat with anyone because of it.
Recording devices tab only shows IDT High Definition Audio CODEC left. I am pretty sure Microphone should be there as well.
F9 is on and I can still use the webcam (logging in with face recognition).
I tried installing the audio driver from Dell, but that didn't work out for me.
Any suggestions would be wonderful. Thanks!

 

ive got an m15x with an i7 740 qm and a ati 5730 my display driver keeps crashing mostly when i try to watch a video using vlc at first it will recover then my screen will go blank and keep flashing and i have to pull the power cord to kill it when i checked the event log it showed my display driver had crashed and recovered several times until i pull the powercord it has the old dell vista driver and when i try to update it the cataylst says it fails and doesnt update my driver

 

I've owned my m15x for a while now, and although up until recently I've had no complaints at all, lately I've been encountering an issue where I get more and more BSOD's, to the point where sometimes it will happen several times within an hour. It doesn't seem to have any consistency, except that it seems to occur more frequently when I'm gaming. So far I've tried defragging my hard drive, running cc cleaner on the registry, running spybot search and destroy. At this point I'm thinking of maybe deleting and getting the latest graphics driver on my 5850, but basically I'm not sure what the issue is. My theories are either something is hardcore broken with the GPU, or my HDD is aids and files on my hard drive (perhaps the gpu driver) are getting corrupted. My PC was helpful enough to provide me with two crash dump files:

122713-15490-01
WER-115487-0.sysdata

if either of these are any useful towards helping me troubleshoot what the problem is I would be happy to paste them up here otherwise sorry for the lack of useful information - I'm a bit clueless

 

Can you download BluescreenView and let us know the bug check codes and files that are causing the crash?
Have you monitored the temperatures while gaming?

 

http://i.imgur.com/3S4COui.png - this is from the bluescreen program - been kinda busy so that took me a while

temps while gaming would max out in the at 78ish while playing league of legends with a bunch of things running in the background - which I would imagine is a bit on the high end, and I am overdue on a clean/repaste job on my laptop, but I feel like ti shouldn't be causing bluescreens in of itself. I'm planning to switch my HDD for an SSD and hoping that that will resolve the issue, assuming the problem is corruption on the HDD.

 

Looks like GPU related - either the driver or the card is having a problem and causing the bluescreen.

 

Hi mate, did you upgrade or changed your ram s recently? I had the similiar problem a while ago with my m15x and and tried almost everything but no success. The culprit was my brand new and also faulty rams. I resolved it by changing back to stock ones. Hope this helpes.

 

Hello,

I have a problem with a RAM upgrade.

Today I upgraded my RAM from 4GB to 8GB. Everytime after the alienhead bios screen, I get an error message about some hard- or software failure. When I try to continue, the laptop enters a loop and reboots after a few seconds.

When I enter the bios it does show the right amount of ram, so the laptop does recognize the ram modules.

Whats wrong? I upgraded with 2 crosshair 4gb modules. 204-pin SO-DIMM, 1333 MHz DDR3 so its supposed to work? I've set all configurations in the bios back to default, but that didnt change anything. Also tried to run with just 1 module, that didnt work either. When I put the original ram back in, it does boot like normal. Running bios version A9

I hope anyone knows how to solve this issue. All help will be greatly appriciated!


EDIT: Solved the problem. Even though the manual shows that 1333MHz DDR3 is supported. It is not the case with my I5 540M. So i've ordered 1066MHz ones. Will test tomorrow, hope they'll work!

 

Did they work fine?

 

Yes, problem solved

 

Hello!
Summary:
I've had my m15x since the summer of 2010. Right now I'm trying to restore it back to the factory settings, however I have run into a few problems.
The recovery partition does not appear to exist. Dell Datasafe Local backup does not allow me to either backup or recover my laptop back to factory conditions, and the windows restoration tool only has recovery points that go back a few weeks. I suspect that it is because the recovery partition is no longer available. However, when I just decided to do a clean install of windows instead, when in the windows installation, it detected two recovery partitions. I wonder if there is anything I can do to somehow access them from within windows to complete a factory image restore. Any help would be greatly appreciated!

The next part of my post will go into some of the details that might help diagnosing the problem
- Originally about a month after I got my laptop, I ran into problems with the AlienFX. I ended up installing the CC from the resource disk, something I didn't know at the time is a serious mistake. However, after realizing it was an older version a few minutes after installation (I only discovered the issues with the disc-based CC recently) I did a factory restore in order to get the old CC back. I don't know if this short time with the disc-based CC has had any lasting effects, as my laptop was functioning perfectly for a long time afterwards.

- Towards the end of 2012 I did another factory restore. However, this time I first reinstalled windows, instead of simply reverting it back to factory conditions by mistake. I did, in the end manage to restore it to factory conditions. I'm not sure but I suspect that this is the cause of the undetectable recovery partition(s).

- After some time I would receive an error message whenever I logged in:
"Microsoft .NET Framework
Unhandled exception has occurred in your application. [followed by continue and quit options]"
Whichever option I would choose would lead to an Alienware AlienFX Controller window popping up with a block of text. My AlienFX have not been editable since I started receiving the error, and the alienhead power button and on the back of the laptop have not functioned at all, except when the laptop is in standby.

- Tired of this error, I decided to do a factory restore this week, only to find out the issue with the recovery partition. In attempting to fix it I tried the power drain trick, which I had not read about before. I should not that my battery is not functional at all. After doing the power drain trick, when I started my laptop, my wallpaper had been changed to the default one the laptop shipped with, my taskbar lost all customization, and my start menu doesn't seem to remember my "most used" applications, even after using the laptop for some time. I do not know the extent of the issues that were caused after my power drain trick attempt, but those are the most obvious.

EDIT
- I have never been able to access AlienRespawn by pressing F8 from the boot screen
- bluetooth doesn't really work - possibly due to MotionJoy being installed

Any help would be greatly appreciated! I would prefer to restore the laptop to factory conditions rather than a clean install of windows. If you require any more information ("bcdedit /enum all" readout for example) please ask!

Thanks in advance!

 

You could do what I did - completely reformat the HDD, set up new partitions and re-install Windows. This is not ideal, but my laptop runs great now!

 

[SOLVED]

Hello,

I have a problem with my Alienware m15x

Just a bit of information:
Alienware m15x bought 3,8 years ago somewhere
Nvidia GTX 460M
Intel core i7 940 XM
RAM 8 gb
SSD 500gb samsung evo 840
64 bit windows 7 ultimate
150w AC adapter
Using the latest bios version A09
Using a custom set powerplan
Battery is totally dead, not recognized in windows anymore

Ok my problem is kind of odd.
I need to have the AC adaptor plugged in to be able to use my laptop no big suprise there as the battery is dead
but lately my brightness of the screen goes up and down.
the performance is decreased for a few seconds as if it is going over to the dead battery and then back over to the AC adaptor
but in theory if it switches to the battery it should instantly go off as the battery is dead right?
but yeah having the performance drops and screen brightness going up and down is quite annoying. Besides that if that happens sometimes it goes into sleep mode while with my custom power plan i have set it to not go to sleep mode...(even at critical battery power it is turned off to do nothing, it may not even go into sleep mode)
even with the program insomnia (program that prevents going to sleep mode) it still went into sleep mode last time i played a game.
Also it has turned off instantly a few times instead of going to sleep mode.
I also noticed the AC adaptor runs quite hot

Now I have no clue what to do with this because, is it a problem of the AC adaptor not giving enough power or something or overheating? or is the motherboard not transfering the power correctly?
I've been thinking about it quite a lot but couldn't really find a solution for it.
The light of the AC adaptor does not flicker as far as i noticed...

i tried using a different socket which is no difference still the same problem.


Thank you for helping,

Kevin


ok what i noticed is that my power cable is a little bit loose when plugged in
I think that is causing the problem as when I move around a little bit with power cable the screen is flickering

found out the problem...
seems like a faulty DC-in plug...
though I don't know how to replace that
I know you can buy those DC-in plugs on ebay but I don't have the knowledge of soldering that.

 

Have you checked if your speedometer touch button has been activated. Try re disabling it. Might work

 

Try testing the ram with memtest86+ (In a dos environment, NOT windows. There are plenty of guides to make a bootable usb or cd with memtest.) Try re-seating the ram too. (pull out and put back in the ram...pref do this before testing ram.) Also check your temps on the CPU and GPU. (use HWMonitor for that) Check the hard drive for errors using the tools available from the manufacturer of your hdd/sdd. (if possible, use a Non windows environment. Try looking for the ultimate boot cd software online. it has tools for various tests!) Also check to see if you have malware/spyware on your machine. Good luck!

 

Try setting the recovery partition as active in diskpart utility. MAKE SURE you select the right recovery partition. You can use the command prompt to do this. (You need administrator rights so make sure you run as admin!) Also be sure you have the windows install disk just in case.

 

What devices do you see on the recording tab in the sound properties? do you see microphone AND microphone array on the IDT HD audio device?