When I purchased my Quad Core XPS-720, I was excited to be able to purchase a major vendor's system with over clocking built into the default BIOS. Unfortunately, the promise has never been fulfilled. The system has locked up regularly since I purchased it and Dell's only support response: reinstall the OS. Given the amount of work and uncertainty of the fix I never did. Since Dell has released the XPS 730 and failed to certify the XPS 720 for Windows 7, I suspect that a hardware design issue may be causing the lockups, but given my options (this system was too expensive to dump after 2 years) I have decided install a clean copy of Windows 7 64 bit to see what happens.
I used my Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate upgrade DVD and installed using the fresh copy installation option (vs. the in place upgrade). This allows me to dual boot my machine (Vista or 7) in case something goes horribly wrong. The down side is that I have to recreate my environment.
The installation went fine and all the hardware drivers were detected found. The only issue was the failure of a critical Windows Update patch for the NVidia GeForce 8800 GT video card. Since, I could not find a valid Dell Windows 7 driver for the video card; I decided to try the Vista 64 bit driver. This driver solved the issue and actually provided more control panel functionality than the one found by the installation. I now need to install the NVidia RAID drivers to add the disk management functionality to the NVidia control panel.
I have started the application reinstallation process with Office 2007 Ultimate and SQL Server 2005 with all associated Service Packs. So far so good; I will add applications day by day and update this blog. I will start testing over clocking today by setting the processor to 3.2GHZ.
Ramblings for the week of April 28st in My Digital Life
I decided to annotate the title of this weekly post with the word "ramblings" since it more clearly describes the content I write on Monday mornings.
I received my SanDisk 8GB micro SDHC card for my Tilt from Digital Media Outlet for $56 and it includes a USB adapter. It works well with the AT&T Tilt, I just copied the content of my 2GB card to the 8GB card and was on my way...I will be using it heavily this week transferring the contents of my Sony camcorder so I can email selected content to the Kodak Gallery.
I may have found an issue with my Dell XPS 720 disk configuration which might be causing the blue screen. When I installed the RAID 1 array, I use for data, I installed the drives in two bays next to each other without looking at the controller setup. There are 2 SATA controllers in the system and my RAID configurations was using both. Theoretically it should not matter and would provide a redundancy on the controller front, but you never know how the nVidia RAID drivers are architected. I decided to try placing both disks on the same controller, the system seems more stable (it has been up for over 2 days). The jury is out and I will have to see how things go this week.
As HD content includes more and Dolby Digital audio tracks, it is becoming a real pain to switch the Directv DVR audio output between standard PCM and Dolby Digital. I believe the problem is with my older Yamaha AV reciever. It does not automatically detect and switch modes between signal types. So when we switch to a program with PCM audio and the DVR is in Dolby Digital mode, the receiver is still processing the audio as Dolby Digital (that is what output is tagged as) although the content of the stream is PCM. The audio is so low that you cannot listen to it. This off course is only a theory, however from my forum research it seems to be a fairly common issue with certain receivers. I will have to test with a newer receiver to validate. I will probably try to stick with a Yamaha receiver, I always found them to be solid good sounding units. The local audio/video chain has a 30 day return policy so I should be in good shape, they also match the big box store pricing...
This week:
Posted by sskarlatos on April 28, 2008 at 09:06 AM in AT&T Tilt, Commentary, Dell XPS 720, Directv, Thinkpad X60, Travel Technology, Web/Tech, Windows Mobile | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
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