Dell XPS L501 Issues

I am having some random issues with my L501, so I thought I would see if anyone else is having these same issues.

1. Four times when the laptop went to sleep, it shut off and when I turned it on it said that windows didn't shut down correctly. I will attach the dump files if someone could look at them for me, I can't seem to get the symbols loaded correctly for debugger.

2. One time the fan kicked into its top speed for no reason and wouldn't stop until I rebooted. It was just sitting idle, with no CPU usage.

3. I purchased an iomega ego usb 3.0 drive with the laptop through dell, and once and a while it hangs up. I have to unplug it and plug it back in. Only seems to do it on the left side USB port. I get this error in event viewer Event ID 51, "An error was detected on device \Device\Harddisk1\DR10 during a paging operation."

4. Yesterday, I got a BSOD while surfing the internet, when the laptop came back up I lost my Bluetooth mouse, and had to reinstall the bluetooth drivers to get it to pair up.

 

Just an Update:

1. From what I can see in the dumps, it appears to be the Intel Centrino Wireless-N 1000 card. So I went to Intel's site, and got newer drivers than Dell has on their site. So I upgraded from 13.2.0.30 to 13.4.0.04. If someone could verify that was the driver causing the sleep BSOD I would appreciate it.

I also went to broadcom and installed the latest bluetooth drivers.

I will post any further updates, and help would be appreciated. The problems are too intermittent to call Dell yet, and I can't reproduce any of them.

 

Sorry I can't help you but I'm having this issue too. I'm pretty sure that it's the wireless driver (Intel 6200). I tried to install the one from the intel site but it says its an older driver than I have. It always happens when it goes to sleep (or tries to sleep). Maybe someone can help me too... I'm not too good with these kind of issues. Its happening pretty much every day.

I installed "who crashed" and it always reports the same two things:

On Mon 12/13/2010 4:58:20 PM GMT your computer crashed
crash dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump\121310-19219-01.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: ntoskrnl.exe (nt+0x70740)
Bugcheck code: 0x9F (0x3, 0xFFFFFA80067AAB90, 0xFFFFF80000B9C518, 0xFFFFFA8006450900)
Error: DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE
file path: C:\Windows\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: NT Kernel & System
Bug check description: This bug check indicates that the driver is in an inconsistent or invalid power state.
This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem.
The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver which cannot be identified at this time.

and-

On Mon 12/13/2010 4:58:20 PM GMT your computer crashed
crash dump file: C:\Windows\memory.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: ntkrnlmp.exe (nt!KeBugCheckEx+0x0)
Bugcheck code: 0x9F (0x3, 0xFFFFFA80067AAB90, 0xFFFFF80000B9C518, 0xFFFFFA8006450900)
Error: DRIVER_POWER_STATE_FAILURE
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: NT Kernel & System
Bug check description: This bug check indicates that the driver is in an inconsistent or invalid power state.
This appears to be a typical software driver bug and is not likely to be caused by a hardware problem.
The crash took place in the Windows kernel. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver which cannot be identified at this time.

 

Early Acer 3820TG owners had some similar issues with powermanagement software and WIFI cards. Our problem was mainly with Broadcomm cards. Does your XPS have it's own power management software? If so, I would disable it and see if you still have the problem. If not, go into the windows power settings and switch the WIFI card to performance settings rather than power saving settings. See if any of that works.

Bronsky

 

I used to do that on the WIFI driver on each notebook I had, that avoid intermittent connection loses as well.

 

OK, I changed the windows power settings to maximum performance.

 

^ so did I. Since mine has been doing this everyday, it won't take too long to see if it helps! Thanks

 

Update: I did some hard drive stress tests to start trouble shooting my iomega ego usb 3.0 issues.
1. read test plugged into either 3.0 ports, hung at random times.
2. read test plugged into USB 2.0 port, completed fine.
3. then i plugged a USB 2.0 hard drive into the 3.0 ports, completed tests fine.

Conclusion, the drive only hangs up when running on USB 3.0. Not sure what the fix is, maybe driver or the on board chip.

 

Just a quick update... since changing the wireless to maximum performance I haven't had a another crash. I even left outlook open while closing the lid to sleep which would ALWAYS cause it to crash. Thanks again guys!

 

what do you mean by "wireless to maximum performance"?
Is there such a way of configuration? or did u mean "battery/power to maximum performance"?

 

If you go into your battery/power settings and click on "choose when to turn off the display", then click on change advanced power settings, you'll see a setting for your wireless connection.

 

Another update: I found newer firmware and drivers for the USB 3.0 chip. It seems better but still hangs on stress test.

Here is the link to the drivers and firmware

SONY/NEC firmwares

I seen a response and speed increase over all using these.

 

how to set this ? wireless to maximum performance ?

 

See my post above...