Dell :: Diagnosing M170 (potential Dead Mother Board)
Apr 22, 2009
It seems my aging XPS M170 died on me, here is what happened...
The original hard drive started giving me errors last week, I backed up my important data just in time right before it gave up the ghost. I got a new hard drive, installed it without a hitch and reinstalled Windows XP.
Up till here all is good, I installed my video drivers, sound drivers, wireless drivers etc, all good. Then installed Zone Alarm and all fine as well but when ZA asks to reboot to continue install I clicked "reboot now", my M170 proceeded to shot down.... and it stayed down for good!!! it didn't reboot at all, so I pressed the power button and nothing, absolutely nothing...
I am thinking my motherboard might have died but not sure, I saw one on eBay for $140 or so, but how can I be sure if it is a dead motherboard? Would a bad CPU cause this apparently dead behavior as well? because I mean, it is like if it didn't have any power at all, no activity of any kind, or lights, full nothing when I press the power button.
My wife has an Inspirion 9300 which has same battery, I tested my battery on her lappy and it is fine..
I took a dead HP DV6103nr. I am trying to diagnose if its the motherboard or something else.
- The notebook is completely dead, no lights, won't power on.
- I get 18.9 volts from the end of the AC adapter power tip where it plugs in.
- I have completely disassembled the notebook. I get 18.9 volts through the USB/Power Jack board, which is separate on this notebook, all the way to the motherboard.
- When I disconnect the USB/power jack board from the MB, and plug in the AC adapter, the blue light on the USB/power jack lights. As soon as I connect it to MB, lights out.
i got the New DC/USB power board today and installed it. Put everything back together and its still Dead. Could something else have been damaged. The old DC/USB board smelled burnt and it had a little smoke coming out by the board. Which led me to believe it had a short and burned up. Now I dont know what do do. Any suggestions to trouble shoot this? I allready got a now AC charger and battery so i know thats not it.
I got a quick demo of a Dell Inspiron Mini 12 decoding a 1080p H.264 Blu-ray rip (20 - 35Mbps) while running through a Quake III timedemo.
The video clip didn’t drop any frames and the Quake III demo ran at above 30 fps. The engineers on hand indicated that a real concern in these sorts of situations isn’t the GPU horsepower, the PowerVR SGX core can easily handle the two tasks, but rather memory bandwidth.
Poulsbo only supports a single channel of DDR2-533 memory, barely enough bandwidth by today’s standards.
The Imagination Technologies staff also ran a dual stream video decode demo where they had a Atom/Poulsbo netbook playing one 8Mbps H.264 video and a 1080p H.264 video on an external display, simultaneously. Again, memory bandwidth is the only limitation here - the Atom never peaked above 29% CPU utilization."
EDIT: If this was true, then the HD limitations on the Poulsbo chipset is a software/driver issue, not hardware. Furthermore, if this potential was achieved, then Ion would be obsolete -
the Poulsbo uses far less power than the 945GSE, which itself uses far less power than Nvidia's Ion.
It came from a library and looks very clean. Booting however indicates problems. Sometimes it will boot to the login screen but mostly there are lots of vertical lines, error messages I can't read, etc.
I was able to get into the BIOS once and I was checking boot order. That seems fine. I tried to get into safe mode several times but was not successful.
Is the presence of those colored lines, bars more indicative of a bad video chip or could it just be a driver problem.
I am about 75% sure this dell is the one. I am seriously considering the lenovo U330 (heavier-ugh but w/hdmi port) or a Thinkpad T400 (maybe 400s) because i am hard on my computers
The e4300 is my top choice because of it's weight, but I saw the Studio 14z and was a bit put off. I know consumer vs. business can be apples to oranges, but I it made me start to think...
I am at my wits end with my e1705. I had a sudden meltdown about 2 weeks ago... screen went scrambled, BSOD,etc...
Performed diagnostic, memory on video card came back as bad. Replaced with new card (from Dell), reinstalled OS, completely reinstalled nVidea drivers from Dell (Used driver cleaner too)...
Everything went smooth for a couple hours after this was completed yesterday (full diagnostic showed no errors), but after booting up today, after about 5 or 10 minutes of use screen freezes and turns either solid cyan or black... a small pattern of thin lines appears also.
I was playing stalker a few days ago getting 50-70 FPS and now come today its so much lower at 20-30(not playable) and I tried CS:S, and COD4, and they all seen dramatic fall in FPS. I don't notice any artifacts but I just notice huge FPS hits. I also think my fan isn't running anymore but I am not sure. Does anyone one know what I should do now? Its out of warranty already.
Today I just rang Dell part sales department and was told the left I/O board which has 2 USB 3.0 port for Precision M6500 is available now. The price is 117 pound with one year warranty ! (about $175)
I recently purchased a M170 with 6800 Ultra off ebay and have been using it for the past week or so. During this time, I have noticed that the temps get quite high when running graphic intensive applications. I currently have an e1705 with a 7900GTX installed so I am familiar with the heat dissipated from a high end graphics card but the M170 seems to get very hot in comparison to my e1705. I am not sure what are considered high temps so I will just post my readings from I8kfan (these are the peak temps):
Pentium M 760 2Ghz 1Gb Ram 60Gb HDD Geforce Go 7800GTX 256mb 17" WUXGA Windows Media Center 2005
I was playing CS:S, and all of a sudden i was getting artifacts on the display. Than the computer froze up and i had to power the laptop down manually.
I was able to restart the computer in safe mode a couple times.
But wow when i try to restart the computer, i'm getting artifacts on the Dell Splash screen. And then it would freeze up.
What do you think the issue is? At first i was thinking the GPU is the problem. But now i'm beginning to think its the motherboards.
I'm still on my XPS M170, planning to moved to a Macbook Pro next year because of certain reasons but anyways its still working. some wear and tear on the paint.
Some questions:
If your XPS M170 has Windows Vista which drivers are you running?
OR if it has Windows XP which drivers are you running?
and how's your XPSM170?
For those who moved on /Upgraded to a better system, what is it? WHat did you did with your XPS M170 / Gen 2?
I am guessing my GPU crapped out on me because when I install video drivers and reboot the system it won't boot into Windows without safe mode. Anyways, is it possible to get a replacement GPU without a warranty? Anything I can talk to about Dell Customer Service about? I'm broke and I just got the laptop.
I just recently acquired a m170 and have an issue. I could not get it to stay on for more than 30 sec to load windows.....as soon as i disabled speedstep in the bios i was able to load windows.....only problem laptop runs at 800mhz......if i enable speedstep it shuts off before windows loads.....
I have built lots and desktop PC's in my time, but know very little about laptops. I have a few year old Dell M170 XPS which is getting a little ragged.
I thought I recalled when buying it that it had a dedicated graphics card which could be upgraded in the future.
It currently has a 7800 GO (I think) in it with PCI-E interface.
I have a dell xps m170 laptop I got back in April of last year, and I forgot to renew my warranty, so it's expired. My problem at the moment is that a few times the past week, I'd be using the computer normally and the screen would go black and everything would stop. I'd try to turn it back on, but wouldn't go to BIOS screen.
I would wait a few minutes, come back, power on again, everything would work fine. Then on Wednesday of last week, it crashed again, but would not go to the Dell screen/BIOS etc, just turn on, fans and lights go on, but just a black screen. I'd wait it out a few minutes, no change.
I took out the Hard Drive, tried to boot up still, powers on, but no Dell screen or anything. I took my computer to Geek Squad thinking they can tell me what my problem is, so I paid them 60.00$ to identify the issue. A day goes by, and they tell me after completing some sort of tests, that it may be a motherboard issue of some sort.
I go to pick it up, and they weren't able to tell me any specifics, they just said, we think it's the motherboard.
all m170 owners out there.. what is the latest game that you have played on your system and how good does it play? the last game i had bought and played with mine is warhammer dark crusade.. haven't been gaming for awhile and interested in buying a very good game..
how many different types of screen inverter there are for the dell latitude d520(15") as ive tried 2 different ones without success and i know the only fault is the inverter.
I'm not sure if anyone else has had this issue, but my CPU maxes out at 100% utilization if I try and play any video what-so-ever (uTube, ABC.com, sling media, etc). It's causing video playback to stutter and is driving me crazy. I try and keep my video drivers at the newer releases - currently I'm using the 180.43 from laptopvideo2go. I also always format and perform a fresh install on the system once or twice a year to keep it running at it's peak. Specs are below:
OS: Vista 32 bit Ultimate SP1 Memory: 2gig Processor: Intel Pentium M 2.26 ghz
Yesterday when i was watching movie strange lines appeared on screen. I restarted and noticed they even appear on DELL welcome screen;/ so its not driver problem. My laptop temperatures are ok also, and i never overclocked it.
Performance in games dropped to zero too.
Is there any way to fix it or i have to replace my graphic card ?
