Is anyone aware of any issue with the touchpad on this model? For about a year now, on occassion the mouse pointer will just completely freak out (I do't know ho better to describe it). All control of the pointer is lost, it moves really fast, and shus down and resizes windows seemingly randomly. I can stop the behavior by CONTROL-ALT-DELETE, but it's a real problem. Lately it is getting worse.... And the mouse pointer has started to just freeze completely.
It is not a driver issue. I've tried changing drivers to no avail. I even completely rebuilt my machine from a clean build a month or so ago. The problem remains.
The computer is a couple years old now, but I don't put lot of junk on it so it still runs fast. And the light casing is great. I really don't want tohave to buy a new machine.
My vaio's fan quit around the time I installed Windows 7. I cannot say for sure that Windows 7 caused the problem, but I cannot for the life of me get the fan to turn even one revolution now.
So I have looked into replacing the fan which actually seems very simple. My problem is, before I pay the money for a new fan, how do I ensure that the problem is actually the fan and not the thermostat on the motherboard which would make replacing the fan worthless.
The fan would be repairable, however, a failed thermostat means that I should just back up the hard drive and prepare for eventual component failure as it is heating up like a sun of a gun now.
I'd like to upgrade the hard drive on my Vaio, and I found a number of options here to purchase a new drive to make sure I get a compatible one. I'm leaning toward the 7200 rpm 320 gig model.
What I'm concerned about is doing the actual upgrade after cloning my current drive to the new one, as Sony says that hard drives are not user-upgradeable.
I've replaced a hard drive before on a Toshiba laptop, and on a TiVo, and many times on a desktop computer, so I have some confidence that I could probably do it if I had instructions, which I don't. I saw the instructions here about upgrading a different model -- is it probably sufficiently similar that a moderately geeky girl could manage this herself?
I've had my M4400 for less than a year now, but it's slowly falling apart, despite very good care on my part.
The problems so far:
+ 0 weeks after purchase: the fingerprint reader doesn't properly function due to driver issues + 2 weeks after purchase: the screen failed and had to be replaced + 3-4 weeks after purchase: the webcam failed (it was probably dead on arrival with the new screen) and had to be replaced + ~3 months after purchase: the inner bezel was permanently marked by the inside rubber feet + ~4 months after purchase: said rubber feet came off, causing the screen to flex more and the marks to worsen + ~6 months after purchase: the system frequently overheated, becoming uncomfortably hot to touch and causing an ever so slight bend in the chassis in the lower right corner + ~9 months after purchase: significant wear and flex on the keyboard, plus the matte surface on the lid has worn off in parts after using Dell's padded case + ~10 months after purchase: the black film on the left speaker is pealing off
I really love Dell, and I've bought a few systems before, but I'm quite surprised this notebook is falling apart so badly after such a short period of time.
My question is: what should I ask them to do?
Can Dell only replace individual parts, or could I get a new system from them? If so, what happens about my upgrades (RAM and HDD)? Do they take them back too?
As an aside, I know it's early days, but does the M4500 suffer from similar design defects too?
I have a Dell Inspiron N5010 and about one year ago it starting booting slowly. I created a second partition and installed a vanilla Windows 7 on it and booted into it and it still boots slowly.I've tried every form of optimization that various sites, including you, have told other people in forums. Drivers, defragmentation, chmod, and various other things I can't remember.
It takes about 3-5 minutes for a cold boot and about 9 minutes from hibernation. Sleep mode works normally.I don't know what the issue could be. There's only two more things I have not done: backup and reformat the whole drive and update bios.I have recorded me starting my laptop in safe-mode to show that the drivers load very slowly: URL...
I dont know wat happened to my Dell XPS L502x. Since a month, It is getting struck when i m working with my laptop. Start Up and Shutting Down times are okay, But after starting up, if i open any window, it is getting struuck. Some says "There is a problem with ur hard disk" and some says processor is problem....
I have a Dell Studio 1745 and there is an issue with the magnetic switch. The issue seems to be that the switch itself can't seem to make its mind up whether it has been activated or not. On boot the screen flickers on and off slowly, placing a magnet near the track pad (where the switch is located) increases the rate of the flickering, however it does not solve the problem. Looking inside the laptop the switch seems to be a soldered chip, is there any way to solve this completely? I've connected it to an external monitor, however the picture will only stay on the screen with the magnet in place, removing the magnet causes the picture to come away from the monitor and back to flickering on the laptop.
My Acer Aspire V3 772G that I purchased about 18 months ago is starting to behave quite strangely. Â The machine has started to run more and more slowly. I have up to date Norton anti-virus, plenty of room on the hard drive, defragment the main drive and try to keep all software up to date. Â The other, potentially related issue, I have is overheating. When I run certain online games the left side of the laptop get very hot and I have checked the temperature which get to about 100 degrees C and then the machine shuts down without any warning. I am already using a stand with a fan. Â The only thing that I can think of that might be causing this is out of date drivers. When I check from the Device manager it says that all the drivers are up to date and this is confirmed when I look on the Acer site. However, when I go to the Intel site it says that there are more up to date drivers for the integrated graphics card. Should I ignore Acer's information and install the new driver?
the screen went black, then returned to the desktop and reported an error with my graphics card’s driver (8600M GT with the latest driver from Nvidia 195.62 or something similar).
This process then repeated and I was confronted with the dreaded BSOD!!
So thinking something had corrupted with the driver, i booted into safe mode and began reinstalling the drivers again.
This all went fine, up until tonight when I was unwittingly enjoying some call of duty and this happened...
The screen juddered for about a second then froze on that image .....
I'm coming up on the end of my 1-year warranty, and quite a few things have started to fail on my beloved E1705, so I thought I'd make sure I know exactly what's up before I call Dell -- the last (and only) time I called them to get something (a keyboard) replaced, I was on the phone for hours. As I need quite a lot more replaced than a $50 keyboard, I'm a bit nervous.
First of all, I think my GPU's (256MB 7900GS) failing.
(I'll replace these if they're way too big -- native resolution, and I 'unno if notebookforums has a thumbnail system)
From what I've been able to gather, that would be the vRAM going bad? Points on the screen connecting to other random points and stretching the texture to get there. Also, on top of that, I get a lot of snow in loading screens, and stuck pixels (usually red) when the GPU's warmed up -- usually ~50-65C (under load). I've also noticed a performance decline, getting about half the FPS in most situations I did compared to when the PC was new (and yes, it's still clean, the HDD is pretty much empty, defragmented, drivers up to date).
Also, the main problem, is I often get the NMI Parity Error: Hardware Malfunction when playing games. It used to be 2-3 times a day when the problem first presented itself, now it's within 5-10 minutes of starting a game, rendering them unplayable. I think this'd also be the GPU?
M'kay, so on top of that, I think there's something going on with my sound port. One day my speakers just stopped working. I thought I'd messed up the drivers or software or something, but headphones worked fine. I came across an old post about the motherboard on this notebook, and it was mentioned that if one applied pressure to the headphone jack (which the headphones were unplugged), the speakers would begin to work. Sure enough, that's the case -- press on the headphone jack and audio comes through the internal speakers. So that means the port's starting to come loose? It seems like I would need to get the entire motherboard replaced?
One day as I'm turning on the computer (2008 imac) somebody (not going to say who) decides to just turn the computer off just about 3-4 seconds after I clicked the power button. When I booted up the computer again many things were wrong.
1. The computer runs extremely slow, both in my windows and mac partitions, I've pretty much concluded that this is hard drive problem since it takes forever to load applications and they run slow if and when they do finally load up.
2. Boot time is much greater, takes several minutes to fully boot up either of the partitions.
So I basically try to figure out what was wrong. I perform disk repair and verify disk operations from the disk utility, and the problem persists. I reinstall the mac OS (Leopard) with the archiving option. The problems still persist. It gets to a point where I can no longer even boot into the mac partition and if I try it keeps restarting itself.
One time a no smoking sign came up without the cigarette (if that makes sense). The windows partition continues to run even slower. Sometimes I can't even log in to my account on the windows side and the computer freezes up. Eventually I ended wiping the mac partition completely and doing a fresh install of Leopard. It fixed the problem somewhat but I feel the mac isn't running as fast it was before and there are other problems. If I update to 10.5.8 the update fails with an error saying something about airport scripts.....
I have upgraded my laptop from 4GB to 12GB (4+8). After the upgrade, the laptop boots and runs very very slowly.My laptop came with 4GB ram 1600 single stick. I upgraded the RAM by adding another stick of 8GB same bus and same manufacturer. The BIOS shows the total memory as 2288MB instead of 12288MB. Windows detects total RAM of 12GB but boots and runs very slowly.I have updated the BIOS from A06 to A07 trying to resolve the problem but with no luck.When installing each RAM stick alone (4gb or 8gb), everything works fine, but the issue comes back again when both sticks are mounted together even when switching the places on the sockets.
My touchpad works with the recommended Dell Alps Touchpad driver installed. It seems clear that this driver (apoint.exe) is only required for gesture control of the Touchpad, and this is my problem.
I start my laptop (Windows 7 Pro 64 bit) and use auto login. The laptop is quickly ready to use. I open firefox or other programs, but I can't scroll with the touchpad. The apoint.exe hasn't started faster than I have, and the gesture controls are not recognised when I use them. When I wait a few seconds, the driver is then active, and the gesture controls work.
This is highly annoying ! I don't have many programs running at start up (I've just done a clean Windows 7 install). My anti virus software does take some time to come up, but its not excessive.
How can I increase the priority of the touchpad driver apoint.exe which I can see in msconfig ? It needs to be up and running fast.
Is it possible to somehow set a group policy in Windows 7, so that this program is running before login is allowed ?
I've tried the recommended Dell driver, and also tried a later version which I found via searching on the Dell web site. Both drivers work fine, but they both take too long to load.
I was wrapping up another late evening of gaming when my game froze and artifacts and red-blue-green pixels took over the screen. I was anew by this, it had never happened before, so I tried to alt+ctrl+del my way out of it and then my machine blue screened and died. I rebooted it and got the Windows boot menu offering safe mode /w networking w/ command prompt and start windows normally, etc. Except there was one ungodly thing different here, everything was misspelled. It offered me 'Start gindogs normally' among other nonsense. When I tried to boot this gindogs thing it wouldn't go past the Windows XP boot-loader and would just give me vertical lines of random colors before blacking out on me.
I tried to reboot a few more times to see if anything new would happen and I noted a few new things. The Dell logo on the boot-screen is covered with white dots and horizontal white lines.
could it be a GPU failure, or a Intel-shat-itself failure?
My computer is couple week old HP HDX18t. When the logon for windows Vista ultimate 64 pops up, part of the screen goes black. From the left hand side of my screen black streaks come about half way across the screen. Its almost as if my computer were turned on its left side and someone drew a line graph that was filled in black beneath the line. (best way I can describe it) It only lasts a second, then goes away. I don't seem to have any other graphics problems.
I have encountered a problem with my laptop - a Dell XPS 15. When the computer turns on, or I insert the charger, the following error message appears:"The AC power adapter type cannot be determined. Your system will operate slower and battery will not charge. This problem might be solved by: Ensure the plug is inserted completely for best system operation. Connect a Dell 130W AC Adapter or higher." I first encountered this problem a few months ago but on occasion, I have managed to get it working by taking the charger in and out a few times.
Though over the last couple of days, it won't charge at all. I have tried using another charger, which yielded the same results; though it was not the exact same charger and actually has a lesser power output. I also checked the bios during start-up, and next to AC Adapter Type was 'Unknown'. Though the charger can power on the laptop without the battery inserted. Just yesterday, my computer also started operating a lot slower, at an almost unusable speed and I think this might be related.
I am dual booting Windows Vista Ultimate 32-bit and Windows 7 b7000 32-bit. The laptop has the copper mod on 7/28/2008 with very good results. It lowered my idle for GPU by 11C and full load by 21C (very good in full load). But my two recent BSOD from Vista and Win7 make me think my GPU is dying, but it doesn't have the typical vertical line problems like other owners. Likewise, it's working perfectly fine after each BSOD (until the second one in Win7).
BSOD in Vista (see attached picture):
*** Hardware Malfunction Call your hardware vendor for support NMI: Parity Check/Memory Parity Error *** The system has halted ***
No event viewer log or memory dump available. Notice the short black bars visible on the blue background. I don't know where those bars are coming from. There are a few white words were NOT static. Some text were shifting during the photograph.
BSOD in Win7 (no picture due to automatic restart):
See attachment of mock-up made in Vista desktop. It's nowhere near what I saw, but it has a similar short strokes of light on a black background. My background was a picture of GREEN grass blades.
The second BSOD occurred while watching YouTube on the same day as the one in Vista. Basically, the screen was fine then suddenly it turned black with short strokes of color showing through where the icons are. About one second later, the screen gets to the classic BSOD blue, but this blue is black instead with the same short strokes of color. And then the laptop restarts after the memory dump, and everything is normal again including the POST.
The GPU averaged around 60C while the CPU was about 50C using HWMonitor. I never had these weird looking BSOD, especially ones with artifacts. It's the artifacts that make me more suspicious. Log file from Windows 7 below:
Quote:
Source = BugCheck, Event ID = 1001
The computer has rebooted from a bugcheck. The bugcheck was: 0x00000124 (0x00000000, 0x857cc024, 0xf2000040, 0x00000800). A dump was saved in: X:WindowsMEMORY.DMP. Report Id: 021709-24913-01...........
My M4400 6-Cell battery goes for about 45min on full charge. Ive had my laptop for a year now. Is this normal that it dies so quickly?...
I started noticing this a week or two ago and now on startup I even get a notification saying "your battery life is decreasing, now is a good time to buy a replacement battery"...
I dont remember how long my Inspiron 8200 laptops battery lasted but it feels like this one gave in really quickly. I do use my laptop a lot. Its on most of the day....
I've heard some stories of XPS systems (m1330/m1530) imploding after 1.5 years... anyone have any firsthand/secondhand info on the percentage of these or have I just heard about a few random people who have been unfortunate enough to have had disasters?
I have the nVidia GPU in my m1330, if that makes any difference - I heard about those dying, but I was under the impression that problem popped up out of the box and not 1.5 years down the road?
It's my only computer, so I use it most of the day, but I don't game (mostly word processing, browsing, working etc) and I try to be gentle with it.
My Thinkpad T520, Windows 7 Pro takes over a minute to load any webpage after waking from sleep. The wifi icon shows that the network has connected to the internet after about 10 seconds from wake up. But if I attempt to use a browser to load any webpage, I must wait nearly a minute before the page will load. After that, pages load quickly.  This problem occurs in multiple browsers (FF, IE, Chrome). I am using Intel Centrino Advanced N-6205 wireless adapter. I've updated the wireless driver and BIOS. I've cleaned out my registry using CCleaner, and I've defragmented.  One bit of advice I've read that I've tried from these forums does NOT work: Uncheck from Device Manager under the Power Management tab for my wireless adapater the option to Allow the Computer to Turn Off This Device to Save Power. Unchecking that option (which would seem to keep the driver on) makes the problem worse because the wifi will not reconnect at all.
I've had my Inspiron 1420 for about a year and a half now, with virtually no problems except when dealing with Windows Vista. But, about a month ago, I was playing a very graphics intensive game and all of a sudden my screen froze, colors inverted, and it started to flash and pixelate at me. I turned my computer off, then back on, and this started happening:
I turned my computer off again and blew out all the dust I could, then let it cool down. When I started back up everything was fine again. But about a week later, it did the same thing, but for longer.
About an hour later it was fine again. A couple weeks went by and nothing like that happened again, up until about three days ago. I was playing my game again and then it started to pixelate, but I could still play. The screen would scramble, but it was almost like it would refresh every 10 seconds or so and the screen would be fine. That night, I was (again) playing my game and my screen scrambled, froze, and went to your basic blue screen.
I rebooted and everything was fine, but the next day I turned on my computer and it did the segemented screen again and when I tried to fix it, another blue screen came up saying "Hardware Malfunction, call you hardware vendor for support .....
I've owned a ThinkPad T430 for about one year now. Originally I was fairly impressed with the battery life (around 4.5 hours) but now after owning it for a year I am very unimpressed with it's short 3 hour life now.  I have read that batteries should be expected to do this, although I have friends with a MacBook Pro which has lost maybe 20% of it's charge over three years not one year like my ThinkPad!
My specs are listed below: Â OS: Windows 8 (upgraded from 7) Ram: 8GB (4*2 DIMM - came with 4GB and I upgrade it with 4 more) CPU: i5-3210M 2.5GHZ Hard Drive: Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD (upgraded from the 320GB 7200RPM HDD before...if I have got those specs right) Â I recently installed the new SSD and expected to see my battery life shoot up again (hopefully at least half an hour) but I really haven't noticed any such improvement. Â I use the battery frequently for school and run the battery down to about 20% maybe twice a week on school weeks? Â Is this kind of deterioration to be expected and should I simply purchase a new battery if I need that extra 1.5 hours? Â According to the Windows 8 battery report the original full charge capacity was: 49,286 mWh, now it is: 39,780 mWh.
