Adam Noble

Right after spending all night creating a Driver map and seeing "who talks to who" in the whole driver universe I came to the conclusion that nothing should be messing around with the way OSD reads and writes its scripts. I did a little digging before systematically uninstalling everything one by one when all of a sudden I noticed somethings strange, I use TeamViewer to interconnect all my machines at home for monitoring purposes and for access away from home, its just a fancy Remote access tool but with a good looking GUI.....ANYWAY when I started playing with the Dell display driver I noticed that Teamviewer had installed its own display driver and called it a "Secondary Display Monitor" Now I thought it may have had something to do with my Crossfire setup first but when I tried to uninstall it I received a BSOD. Only starting in safemode with Team Viewer disabled allowed me to uninstall it and wouldn't you believe....the following boot my OSD is now working fine and touch controls are back (well they all worked except the brightness controls) So it was this Team Viewer driver that was doing something to OSD, I have not seen any changes in Either of them for months and their update logs show this too, so why they have decided to fight now is a mystery, maybe that crash I had that took my cards out of Crossfire had something to do with it, unless that is another symptom :/ Anyway thanks for the help guys, It would appear that I have wasted your time with this but at least we know this problem can happen in the older R2's with Team Viewer

Welcome to the fun guys Right I have tried every single combination and I still come up with this error, I have tried removing OSD, Command Centre and my GPU software + Drivers then cleaned up with Driver Sweeper then installing them in different patterns, even previous versions of OSD. I have tried in both safe mode and normal mode. As I type this I do not have OSD or Command Centre installed, I would leave it this way but My touch controls are now dead as I believe either OSD or Command Centre deals with them. Everything is up to date, BIOS, GPU although I have never flashed the VBios, didn't know you could on the 4870's and to top it off............My Restore settings are being uncooperative and only showing today's restore points () I am stumped for now, everything is working fine except OSD, but apparently any OSD problems are caused by GPU failed writes :/

Trying your suggestions now, like you said its a strange one :/ I have been looking over the logs and the only thing that I have done different was that after a failed shutdown my GPU's came out of corssfire, I noticed this during some GW2 so I closed down, re-enabled and and played some more. That is the only thing I have done different in almost 2 months. I will report back once I have done ALL of the above.

I am now getting this error at startup for no reason, it seems to be a problem with OSD and from what I gather from Google, caused by some sort of bad GPU driver install? I have tried reinstalling OSD from fresh.......I have tried reinstalling my GPU drivers from fresh but no change? Has anyone had any experience with this, with OSD down I am getting a truck load of problems ranging from touch controls to RAM leaks :/ Machine is.. M17x R2 Windows 7 64bit ATI Xfire 4870's - Catalyst version 12.6 - Driver version 9.97 OSD version 2.5.54.0

That sound like exactly what I need I'm not bothered about paying, I have the trial activated now for Diskeeper and seeing a noticeable difference immediately and its not even finished Thanks again mw86

Hi, I have been running my Alienware M17x R2 with the Twin drives for almost a year now and it has been great. I have a 120GB SSD containing only the OS and a secondary 1TB HDD Partitioned into 3 x 300GB partitions. One contains only Games, One contains all Media (Music, Pictures and Videos) and the third contains Windows 8 at the minute for testing. Since instillation I have had all the recommended system settings disabled such as superfetch and Defrag but I have only now realised that these keep the SSD healthy but not the HDD. Now I know I have not made things easy in partitioning the HDD into three but I was thinking is there any way if restoring superfetch and defrag but only on the HDD? It is being bogged down by fragmented data and killing performance in some cases. What do you suggest?

Well i don't understand them sometimes but the job gets done, once their 24 hours was up i called and got the "we have no record of that conversation sir" so i calmly explained that was going to happen and that they would be reported for this, im not asking for free parts or a new system just the disks that SHOULD have come with my system. I explained that had previously happened and when she asked if i would like her to look into the problem i said no thanks and ended the call. The next day i went to my friends to grab a copy of his reinstall media and when i got back.......BAM i had a delivery and wouldn't you know it was my recovery disks, a mouse mat AND a money off voucher for the alienware suite (0_0) must have really spooked someone high up to have been sent a goody bad for a problem that apparently "doesn't exist" Looks like i can finally start rebuilding my baby's brain in all honesty she was due a fresh install anyway Thanks for all you help in this guys especially the tips on how to handle it all mw86, you guys should be on the alienware payroll

Right an update, i followed your advice and everything was going fine for about 2 hours, they took my details and confirmed that my system shipped with 64bit ultimate and that the disks must be faulty if they do not run or complete any actions, they even took my address confirming from the shipping address from the initial purchase but just before anything was finished they said they ask their manager for a confirmation and then they said they would get back to me within 24 hours :S ......... What just happened?

Sounds good, i have to admit once they started saying i was not going to get anything i got a little agitated, tomorrow i am going to settle down and hold my ground for as long as it takes, thanks for the tactic mw86 i will report back when i have things settled. Thanks again.

Oh well it does......Was on the phone for like 2 hours today to dell asking if i could have replacement disks for both OS and Drivers, they asked for my service tag before saying that they do not ship systems with those disks......then after an argument they said they would ship them but i would need to pay.......then after yet another argument they are claiming that my system shipped with a 32bit version of ultimate even though Alien command centre, the program that controls one of the key features of the alienware line...THE ALIENFX...requires a 64bit platform :S Does anyone have an alienware with a 32bit OS installed?

You would not believe it....The recovery disks that came with my R2 are both wrecked 0_0 the drivers CD was a failed write and contains nothing and the OS recovery DVD contains a 32bit version of ultimate not the 64bit needed, this means i am now stuck on a 32bit OS and cant install most of the Alienware suite :(could things get any worse ()

Awesome, i am just about to finish my secondary backup before trying to restore to an external drive and if it works i will need to implement this ASAP because that dimming issue was becoming a real PITA () Thanks guys

bad luck indeed :/ lucky for me my secondary HDD had a 150Gb backup partition that now houses a copy of a working....yet naked OS so i am now able to backup the defective drive before testing to see if it is a hardware or software fault :/ Either way i was due a fresh install of windows anyway AND this wraps up the screen brightness problem

Thanks for the help StamatisX, you would not believe but seconds after writing my last post i came out of Safe Mode to try the driver uninstall and my God Damn SSD failed on me it has taken me this long to get my baby back to a some what "working" state :/ tried everything to get the SSD working but from what i can see it has a Boot Config corruption that i cannot seem to fix :/ looks like its back to the drawing board

Now that is strange, when i boot into safe mode the brightness is as it should be Very bright and vibrant. So this means the problem lies with some sort of software error? only activated in a normal boot.