The ultimate M170/9300/9400 7800GTX Video stuttering topic, WE NEED TO FIX THIS! - Page 2

I truely believe if you reload your system you will be satisfied. The sad thing about Dell is, they build the image, toss all this crappy bloatware on it, and ship it out.

If Dell did it right, they would make their TRUE gaming machines bloateware free. But I don't know how their contracts are written with AOL etc..

You will find a lot of broke registry entries, even after a clean installed. But you won't find that many.

yeah do a reinstall (put CD in, F12 at boot, boot from DVD/CD) and make sure you format NTFS..

let us know how it turns out! im interesting in knowing, because if that solves your problem, it will make me feel much better about getting my system replaced.. because right now, I feel like Dell is going to send me another non-functioning system

right, leave that there - it wont matter

HAve had my M170 for 4-6 months.. No problems.
Used Wireless, Used Internal NIC, Used USB- Ethernet..
Not a problem.

Erase the hard-drive and get rid of everything and start from scratch, you have the disks right? and then only install the bare minimum. sound, wireless, network, chipset and video drivers. Check the device manager and make sure nothing has a yellow question mark on it and go from there. its probably bloat-ware.

just like your posts are

please stop with the useless posts, these threads are for legit problems.. if you dont have something useful to say, go post it elsewhere

just tryin to keep this thread on track.

When you do the reformat.. you will see a tiny partition, don't erase that. That is your diag partition.

Almost every machine you get, whether it be from Dell, Best Buy etc.. you want to reformat it and make it YOUR image.

I've been thinking about this stuff for the past day or so, since the original three stutter threads came along, and I've come up with zilch.

If it's not a virus scanner and it's not a firewall client and it's not a background service ... well, I'm at a loss. I have a feeling if we could all get together in the same room and poke at it a bit, we'd have it nailed down in a matter of moments. The distance involved is working against us, I suppose.

I realize it's not of much help, but you can see my setup in my sig and I DON'T have any stutter problems. I connect through a WRT54G as well, then through a Motorola SB5100. I keep a sparse install with only the critical drivers (wireless, Dell's stock Nvidia, the Intel chipset, sound, etc.). AVG free is the ONLY other thing running ... I use the Windows firewall, for what it's worth (which isn't much). I haven't turned off any other services, with the exception of the indexing service, which I believe to be one of Microsoft's worst ideas ever.

No stutter. I wish I could be of more help. Let me know if there's anything I can do.

I had a similar problem with DAOC and my old alienware ATI/9600. Drove me bonkers because it worked like crap, magically fixed itself and then reappeared. Nothing I could do would fix it.

I know your pain. I just hope you can get some help on it.

I've lived to put up with it on my machine, I've got it now so it's far less noticeable but it's still there - the main culprit I thought was audio as disabling audio meant everything ran smoothly but using a different soundcard to bypass the internal one did not seem to make any difference.

John

Alot of people have posted some sucess when disabling the power saving feature of that hard drive.

Many of the dell hard drives are shipped with a power saving feature turned up to the max.

Alot of the shuttering I have expierenced comes from what seems like a virtual memory swap, but I have 2 gig ram. So more likely its my hard drive trying to access game data and "warming up".

It's almost as if the hard drive will go in power saving mode while games are running, then when you portal out, or load new terrain, the hard drive has to wake up before loading the data, this causes a slight jitter and shutter.

the fix is to download hard drive tools from your manufacturs website and boot from a CD.

for reference, I have a 60GB 7200Rpm Hitachi SATA Drive

how do you disable the powersaving mode of your hdd, as i remember, i checked with centrino hardware control. and it was on maximum, i dont remeber correctly might have been the accoustics..

i just want to play my games on my damn 4000$ machine without a hitch.

Thanks people.

i reinstalled,

Windows XP Professional SP2.
Running 30 Processes utilizing about 200megs of ram.
re-installed drivers
got the chipset and wireless drivers from Intel
Installed the drivers for the rest from dell exept the video card.
For the Video Card Drivers they are set in Performance Mode, 83.20 Extreme Drivers.

i remember the fact tho that in fear mpdemo i was downloading at the same time, might have been causeing the stuttering because of my download,

1. will re-test fear tonight.
2. hl2 does the same exact thing.

i tought it was my router but no, it works fine reflashed my wrt54g.

i will disable bluetooth tonight and the wifi nic internally.

Serious Sam 2 worked so fine, 1920x1200 with HDR and everything at high.
Far Cry, 1600x1200 w/o aa and as but everything at high. caused minimal stuttering.
Doom3, 1600x1200, caused minimal stuttering

i saw that if i enable vsync, the games runned a bit better. did not help in HL2 but helped in Vampires theBloodlines

BF2 worked fine at high resolutions.

Quake 4 1600x1200 all high exept aa and as, caused minimal stuttering, still playable. i noticed the fact that it uses OpenAL as sound driver.

UT2004, no stuttering at all. 1920x1200 without a hitch

Call of Duty 2, 1920x1200 cause little bit of stuttering.

i believe the XPS M170 is a beautiful machine and i expect far more performance from it. lets say my satisfaction levels are at 60%

With my Re-Install, 3dmark05/06 scores might have been 50 points below but its okay, its probably a buffer region.

i installed the latest version of DX, 9.0c

i mean its pretty frustrating, i am buying this to play games and i had more performance on a desktop pc with an x800.

please help.
msn advancedlogic@hotmail.com

YES! i knew this would work.. keep us posted on how other games perform!

dave