lotusman

@svl7, Thanks for all the excellent information you've provided on upgrading, vbios changes and so on. I successfully upgraded my m15x to the 7970m quite a while ago, but have decided I'm not using the benefits from the 7970m enough, so want to go back to the 260m. I tried the downgrade yesterday, but ran in to issues and I'm not quite sure what's wrong. Basically, I completely uninstalled all AMD drivers etc via the uninstall manager, as well as running the DDU (Display Driver Uninstaller) to completely eradicate it. My GPU then showed as the windows generic one and I went about downgrading. But when I put the old card in, I either get a completely black screen, or one time (I switched it in and out a number of times) it was a completely white screen - both white or black, if I hit the power button again it shuts down immediately, so it appears it isn't booting up properly (though I don't see any flashing keys on my keyboard to indicate a problem as I've read elsewhere). I can't get it to come up no matter what I do and I'm not sure what the issue is. I stored it carefully in the anti-static packaging that came with the 7970m, so the card should be fine. I put the 7970m back in and my system came back up as expected, so I'm not sure what the problem might be. Do you have any suggestions I might be able to pursue to determine what is happening. Thanks LM

Hmmm - I think my GPU is running hot. I see my idle temps are around 55 C, and I ran OCCT for an hour focusing on the GPU and the max it hit was about 95 C. I'm not 100% sure how accurate that is, but I brought up GPU-Z and saw it running 88 C and so forth. So I think my GPU is overheating. The interesting thing is that I run these tests and everything continues to run fine even at those high temps - the crashes seem to happen under normal usage (no OC, just normal browsing - many windows open - with various tasks going on in the background that are not GPU intensive). But I think I may need to check and clean the fans and so forth - possibly reapply thermal compound, etc. See what that does.

Well, that doesn't seem to have done a lot. I went ahead and wiped and reinstalled Win 7 x64 from the boot disc. It seemed stable for a bit, but then the problems started to happen again - so it appears unless it's one of the drivers I installed after the reinstallation, that it may be a hardware issue. Dunno. Attached is a picture of my screen on one of the crashes. Another time it just shutdown and restarted for no apparent reason. So I'm thinking it may be hardware, but I'm just not really sure what piece of hardware.... For anyone else reinstalling Win 7, I recommend downloading the offline Win 7 SP1 package beforehand, then installing Win 7 from the Disc, running the SP1 offline installer, then running windows update. I installed Win 7 from the disc, then ran Windows Update and spent the next 5 hours (or possibly more) waiting for it to complete the various times I had to run it until there were no more updates to install....

So I've been reading through this post as I'm interested in doing the upgrade myself and have a few questions as the answers seem to be all over the place: 1) Is the eBay Eurocomm Dell OEM kit the best option for an m15x? 2) Does the HDMI work for sound and video? 3) What is the best driver? Thanks

Am going to work at it when I get time. My system crashed 3 times within an hour last night after having been mostly stable for a while. I noticed it seemed to be getting appreciably slower and the screen flickered at times - going to black, then refreshing the screen (almost like it was reloading it). Some programs would start up, everything locked up briefly, then continued. So I'm a bit lost as to where the issue might be.....

Thanks. I was thinking of a full system reinstall, but was avoiding that if I could. But maybe I should just bite the bullet. Quick question - I haven't reinstalled the OS on here yet, and see there is the Alienware Disc - but it says it is only for recovery. Can I wipe the OS partition and reinstall Win 7 x64 from the disc?

Hi @Michael, Yes, it has happened a few times (don't have an exact count) since I rolled back the driver to the official Dell version. Is it possible the screen cable is loose? I will look in to that, but as you said, it shouldn't have been resolved by a restart.

Hey All, New here - just stumbled across the forums when looking for a solution to my problem and have been amazed at the depth of knowledge and upgrades available I had no idea were possible. Will definitely be coming back!! Wondering if anyone has encountered problems similar to me. Basically, I have a virtually stock m15x (820QM, 8GB, GTX 260M) with the only modification being a HD swap to a Western Digital 750GB Scorpio Black - everything was running fine after that upgrade for months, so I don't think that change has any impact. Recently I have been having issues as follows that are happening fairly randomly - ie I can't seem to pinpoint what I was doing that is causing the issues: 1) Screen simply freezes, flashing to either black or some other colour and not responding except to a hard shutdown 2) Screen goes to a single colour, then almost seems to split the screen in half and flashes - no response other than a hard shutdown 3) BSOD - though this hasn't happened often - much less often than the above freezing states - stating "A clock interrupt was not received on a secondary processor within the allocated time interval." I haven't made much in the way of changes, except maybe stupidly running one of those universal driver update programs that told me to update a number of drivers. I did upgrade to the latest (at the time) nVidia driver, but have since backed that out and gone back to the latest officially supported Dell version (I bought my machine in very late 2009, so I believe from what I've read that it makes mine an m15X R2). I initially thought it was the video card drivers - and backing it out to the Dell version seems to have stabilized it to a degree, but it is still happening sporadically, but less often than before. But to be fair I never really tracked the exact sequence of events when the problems started versus changing various drivers, so now I am stuck as to what to do. I have run rthdribl and stress tested the GPU, but never had any issues - temp never got above about 80-82. I also ran Driver Verifier for all non-MS drivers for about 36 hours as recommended elsewhere, but that didn't amount to anything either. So I am unsure what to do now. Any thoughts? I have been debating moving to the AMD 7970 GPU, but would like to get the issue sorted prior to making any other system changes. Thanks for everyone's help in advance!