Just received a new Dell Precision M6800 Laptop for work

 Computers, Hardware, Software, SQL Server, Windows 10  No Responses »
Feb 012016
 

All I can say is wow, I had a M6400 for about 6.5 years and it worked great, Intel Core 2 Duo with 16GB ram and a 600GB SSD and a 1TB HD it was a decent little beast, but when work says we are getting you a new laptop, who am I to complain. The new beast is quite simply awesome. It has an i7 with 4 cores and 8 logical cores, coupled with 32GB of ram it just churns through everything I throw at it. Only has 256GB SSD now but has a 1TB HD as well, it is still quite a nice laptop, the 17.3″ display has a nice 1920×1080 ultrasharp display being driven by an AMD FirePro 6100 video card, although the resolution makes my eyes work kind of hard it is very nice. But it has not been all sugar and spice with it, which I will cover below.
This is actually my second one after Dell exchanged my first M6800 because of a corrupted display over the display port, and only the display port, whether it was to a true display port or to a display port / DVI connector. I will say that Dell did try to fix it, but it may not have been Dell’s fault either through hardware or drivers, now that I have figured out what caused the corruption, let me document it here in case someone comes upon my blog and is looking for help. Here we go. The first M6800, whenever I plugged in my display port the display would look like this on at the least the display port monitor and sometimes the others would show this on all of the affected displays…Graphics Issue but what really surprised me was that when I moused over a window that was on the corrupted display, Windows 10 actually previewed the window as a corrupted display, very odd. Dell came and replaced my AMD FirePro video card which did nothing and then came out and replaced my motherboard, which also had no effect. I posted on the Dell support forum here if you want to see the background info or to see others having the same issue…Dell Forum Post. That is when Dell decided to just exchange the laptop and see if that fixes it, I received it on Friday and I will document what steps I took over the weekend for anyone that may have a similar issue.
I installed Windows 10, I do love Windows 10 so I installed release version of it on my laptop and it runs just wonderfully on it. I plugged in the display port (DP) and everything was just fine on that display, which the other 6800 could not get it to display correctly. I then installed some utilities that I use all of the time and Chrome and still the DP worked just fine. I then installed Visual Studio 2015 with the ability to build Universal apps and Windows Phone apps, after that install I rebooted, which caused the corruption in the display again….ARGH! So I uninstalled VS2015 and all of its residual stuff and rebooted again. Corrupted display still, so I checked Programs and Features to see what Features might be floating around in there that may be causing it as a last resort, Hyper V was checked, I unchecked it and was forced to reboot, once rebooted, the corruption was gone. GOTCHA! So I reinstalled VS2015 with same settings, then rebooted again to the corrupted display, went into programs and features again and unchecked Hyper V again and rebooted to a clean display, finally! I installed SQL Server 2014 and then all of my other tools and utilities and rebooted again and everything was fine at home on my DP. When I got to the office, where my Ultrawide Dell monitor is hooked to a DP the monitor did not work. I installed the AMD Drivers from Dell’s support site and after rebooting the display started to work just fine and at the 2560×1080 resolution which my VGA port could not do, so now everything is good with the laptop and it works as it should with the DP, now I need to figure out what the downside is with having Hyper V off, hopefully it will not make it impossible to develop for Windows Phone or Universal apps. Hopefully one day there will be a fix for this issue, but since no one has had any answers for me up to this point it may take some time to get a fix.
Hope this helps some one in the future!
Later

Experiencing random lockups on my laptop with Windows 7

 Computers, Hardware, Software  No Responses »
Jun 022011
 

I have been having a problem on my Dell Precision M6400, where Windows 7 was starting to lockup, not where the mouse would stop working but enough of a lockup that any application I could click on was rendered useless with the spinning orb. I ran antivirus scan, a spyware scan, a malware scan, cleaned out my hard drives, defragged the HD, performed a sfc /scannow, even checked my hijackthis, and nothing stood out. This lockup would happen anywhere from 15 minutes to 2-3 hours after a boot, and was getting very hard to find. I went back to another problem I had early on with this laptop, heat, I fired up speedfan, which can be acquired here http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php for free, the temperatures looked weird but not out of the ordinary, or so I thought. That’s when I started to run out of ideas, but I did think it seems to happen when I am looking at something a bit more taxing on my graphics card, so I went to nvidia’s site and grabbed the video drivers for my quadra 2700 FX card, installed them, rebooted and looked at the temperatures again, the GPU temperature dropped almost 20 degrees Celsius and changed the ambient temperature quite a bit as well, and the laptop has been running for 10 or so hours now with no issues of locking up.

Just wanted to throw this out for anyone else that may have troubles.

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