Whatsitdoingnow

Hey there all, my laptop's taken a funny turn and I don't much like it's attitude. A couple of weeks back a huge catastrophe happened and I had to completely reinstall vista. Things have been working pretty much okay since then but I find I keep running into vista related problems I didn't have before and some other unexpected problems and these have all been stemming from the fact that before, the laptop had been pre-installed with all the dell related stuff and windows had been configured by dell.

The latest problem has been that unplugging the laptop results in the battery going from 100% to 97-98% immediately, like the second it's unplugged and then also the laptop's performance takes a hit. Not noticeably at first applications run pretty smooth but then I try to watch a video in full screen and suddenly the video slows down considerably whilst the audio plays at normal speed. I don't have powermizer (that I'm aware of) and battery performance is set on high. Some solutions to similar problems that I found on google suggested changing the registry entry perflevelsrc value in order make the gpu permanently run at full power but this will guzzle the juice and I don't want to encourage that any more than I have to especially as this particular laptop has only 90mins of power at the best of times. Also I don't even know for certain if it's the gpu that's the problem so I don't really want to mess about with this unless there's no choice.

BCCOMP

Hi,
When you reinstalled Vista did you use the Dell CD's to reinstall the drivers and utilities?
Is your Vista fully updated?

Link to drivers and utilities:
http://support.dell.com/support/down...&catid=&impid=

Bill

Whatsitdoingnow

Install CD was a vista 'reinstall' cd with dell written on it, it did install some dell drivers but it seemed to have left out many other drivers and utilities etc that were there in original install. Vista is fully updated and running service pack 1.

BCCOMP

HI,
Lets go into the Device Manager and see if you have any errors (yellow !? or Red x)
Post them if you do.

Is the Dell Utility installed?
Is the Dell QuickSet Utility installed?

Bill

Whatsitdoingnow

Okay device manager is showing a yellow exclamation point regarding a 'PCI device' under an 'other devices' tree, which itself has a blue question mark over the icon. Unfortunately that's as detailed as it seems to want to be. Dell quickset is installed as are various utilities that I've gathered ad hoc as I needed them, I think I've got all the ones I had now, although interestingly the microphone no longer works (it used to work despite me not even having an external mic, somehow the port seemed to sensitive enough to record a signal good enough that voice could be easily distinguished and quality was quite good). Thanks for your persistent help by the way I'm really rather stumped.

BCCOMP

Hi,
On this error in the Device Manager.
Right Click on the error>Properties>Details Tab
Scroll through the drop down box to Hardware ID
Post the info you find.

Thanks,
Bill

Whatsitdoingnow

Pci\ven_1971&dev_0000&subsys_0003105b&rev_00
pci\ven_1971&dev_0000&subsys_0003105b
pci\ven_1971&dev_0000&cc_ff0000
pci\ven_1971&dev_0000&cc_ff00

TriggerFinger

Hi Bill,

Sorry to jump in... but I checked out DELL and here's the download link...

http://support.dell.com/support/topi...up&file=216792

AGEIA PhysX driver... is this a video driver?

Whatsitdoingnow

I've been having a look around and I found my dell utilities and drivers cd so I had a look to see if there was anything I missed since I started collecting these myself over the past fortnight or so. I installed a few things one of them some kind of driver for a special type of intel memory that I think I don't have but I tried it out anyway and some others but really I think they were probably all unnecessary as I already had it seems, everything I needed. One of them seems to have gotten my mic working though :) which is odd as I didn't install any of sound drivers on the disc 'cos the ones I'd downloaded were newer. I did some googling on those hardware id's and indeed as the above poster mentioned they are for my physx card. This is confusing, I actually don't know if this is working or not, it has been giving me this issue for a while and I actually suspected that this probably was what the 'pci device' was all along. The company that made it got absorbed by nvidea so I've downloaded the newest drivers which are newer than dell's, from them, so I don't particularly want to roll back. The thing is, before all this happened I used to be able to see the physx card in device manager but even so it never actually seemed to work at all, neither did my SLI configuration for that matter but that was because they only seemed to release drivers for it that worked, in the past few months despite me having had the thing since December 07. I'm not kidding man, I tried everything to get the damned SLI to work and I eventually just gave up and it wasn't until I had to reinstall everything recently that I found out they had released drivers that worked properly not very intermittently and with problems.

Anyway long story short I can't figure out if it's working or not as the drivers I got from nvidea claim to have installed correctly and the game Mirror's Edge has not given me any gripe about not having a physx card when I enable it, which it did before I updated the drivers. Then again though, it's hard to discern any differences in the game's performance. Okay so now I'm getting very sidetracked but you see it seems to all be interlinking so it kind of is still on topic, the last solution I've managed to come up with is motherboard drivers but I downloaded something which said it had 'reflashed' the motherboard drivers the first day that I installed windows so that should all be up to date as well. I checked the problem again just now and everything seems to running perfectly except this video issue, like no performance reduction anywhere else, and also funnily enough I can't quite know for sure but it almost looked as though the video was slowing down more the longer I played the file for and in turn the lag between audio and video seemed as though it were growing.

BCCOMP

Hi,
Did the link provided by TriggerFinger resolve the error in the Device Manager?
http://support.us.dell.com/support/d...&fileid=216792

You have video related issues (among others), and this may correct it.

I am not sure about this, but maybe TriggerFinger can also have some input on this.

Nvidia did come out with thier own version of Drivers for laptops about 2 months ago.
Yes, they are newer than the Dell drivers, but have not been thourghly tested on all laptops (Dell included).
With laptops, we are restricted to how Dell (and other laptop manufactures) modify these drivers for thier own use.
The Graphics Drivers for Nvidia are generic in respect to take care of most issues.
There might be compatibility issues as Nvidia does not know how the manufacture modified the driver for thier own use.

I do know if there are errors in the Device Manager they need to be resovled.
Seeing the Ageia PhysX Processor is not functioning correctly (error in the Device Manager). I would install this driver to see if it resolves your issue.

Note: It may or may not be compatible with the newer Nvidia driver you have installed. So I would make a RESTORE point before you install this driver.
If you have issues you can always revert back to this restore point.

Bill

Whatsitdoingnow

Okay then, I'll give that a shot and let you know tomorrow how it goes, thanks. I have reservations though as to the working status of the physx card under these drivers because like I said, while it did previously appear in the device manager list, it never seemed to actually work. While I can't be certain that it is now working, there is more evidence to suggest to me that it is than I have ever previously had (especially with regard to mirror's edge telling me with old drivers that I did not have a physx card and then not displaying this message with the new drivers installed). This aside, it also confuses me that it should make any difference as the physx card is just physics calculations like those used in complicated 3d graphics engines of some new videogames in order to take some of the load off the cpu. As there would be no such calculations in media playback, I don't see how it should affect it.

That said though, not going to spurn help when it's offered perhaps this could somehow indirectly affect my problem, or maybe it's related in a way that I've missed. If you guys are still here though, do you have any possible explanations to help put aside my hesitations?

TriggerFinger

Hi,

My two cents...

AFAIK the Ageia processor works as described in the previous post. So basically if you are not a hardcore gamer this has no use to you. The Nvidia graphics card would be sufficient. What we do not know is how the M1730 handles videos. My take is it must be using the Ageia processor somehow. This is where the driver comes in.

About operating the system on batteries, if you set it to conserve battery rather than having a good performance, I would say that would explain why everything is slow. This also brings me to another question... why run on batteries if you can run it plugged to AC?

My approach to this whole scenario would be to run the laptop on AC. This would help eliminate battery related issues. Also I would of course make sure I have nothing questionable in Device Manager. This will rule out defective or problematic devices. All of us know the more variables we have, the harder the troubleshooting gets. I do not know about the others but I would rather see a clean Device Manager list than a list full of red and/or yellow marks... worse a list of many UNKNOWNs.

Assuming it is running on AC, Device Manager list is clear of any marks but performance is still slow... I will test my RAM and hard drive for errors. I will also see if temperature is an issue (check for dust and/or reapply thermal compound). If these things are ruled out but issue is still the same, I would boot using another operating system like linux or may be do a fresh install or repair of Windows.

But as I said... just my two cents.