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Topic: Dell Studio laptops ***Warning*** - Page: 3

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djchris73 wrote :


DJSoulman why don't you try to upgrade to an XPS M1730? SBDJ says no problem with that model...



Money! About £400 more expensive here in the UK

There's a bottom of the range XPS M1530 the same price I paid for the Studio 1535, might ask if they can run the DCP Checker on it and maybe just swap if it's OK.
 
I use my M1730 without any audio problems - however it does suffer from the brief video pause unfortunately :(
 
SBDJ wrote :
I use my M1730 without any audio problems - however it does suffer from the brief video pause unfortunately :(


Hmmmmm....... that's what I'm concerned about. That's why I went for the Studio because of the ATI Graphics card. Think I'll just go for the refund and let the hunt for a good laptop resume.
 
DJSoulman wrote :
DJSoulman wrote :
They are going to send an engineer to my house tomorrow to try and fix it, even the Indian Tech guy said he was skeptical.


God! Would you believe, I got a phone call at 9am this morning from Dell to say the Tech guy that was supposed to be coming to my house has phoned in sick!!! Told them why don't they just skip that part and just give me a refund, still waiting for a reply.


Well back from my brief holiday and the saga continues..............

Waited for a phone call from the Indian Tech guy yesterday, it never came. So, rang up Dell support this afternoon got a different woman this time and she started to annoy me straight away by wanting to start the process all over again! Spent 45 minutes argueing with her as she refused the refund promised by the previous supervisor I spoke to before my holidays. She wanted to send it back to the factory, I told her we already did this and had a new motherboard fitted. She tried to blame the application program (VirtualDJ) told her that there were no application programs on the computer and it is still showing the fault. She even claimed that an engineer had called on the 31st October and no-one was at home!!! Strange that, I told her that Dell phoned me at 9am the same day to tell me the engineer had rang in sick!!!Eventually after going through everything that I've already been through over the past month or two she is going to send an engineer to my house on Thursday. I told her I know the engineer cannot fix it and if he can't can I have a refund. She refused to commit to a refund so I argued that this had already been agreed in October. I pushed the point several times and eventually she hung up on me!!!

So, roll on Thursday, another day wasted no doubt.

It is coming to the point of complaining to my credit card provider and see if I can get my money back that way.

Thinking seriously about going down the Apple route now with a Macbook or Macbook Pro.
 
OMG!!! Dell engineer turned up today changed the hard drive even though there was nothing wrong with the old one. He re-installed the operating system and drivers from the CDs and ended up with unknown device amongst the device drivers!!! He couldn't fix it!!!

Also I'm now left with a computer that does not have a backup partition with the operating system on it, therefore, the restore function does not work!!! The computer is in a much worse state than before the Dell engineer touched it!!! Can you believe it???

He told me I would get a phone call today from Tech Support, still waiting after 3 hours!!! Grrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!
 
Dell=Hell I have had nothing but issues with them, their service sucks and so do their computers. Now before anyone flames me, yes
I know there are users who have had nothing but success with Dell, but that is not the case for me.
 
SBDJ wrote :
I use my M1730 without any audio problems - however it does suffer from the brief video pause unfortunately :(



i have a m1530 4gb, 512 nnvidia geforce, 2.54ghz dual core. i use firewire drives for audio/video..

sbdj, when you say the video pauses, do you mean video will play but it freezes while the audio still continues? this is the issue i am having. when i play audio only, there is NO issues at ALL. but when i scratch videos (mostly .flv converted youtube videos)thats when the issues happen. just seeing if you have the same issue i have...
 
marctronixx wrote :
SBDJ wrote :
I use my M1730 without any audio problems - however it does suffer from the brief video pause unfortunately :(



i have a m1530 4gb, 512 nnvidia geforce, 2.54ghz dual core. i use firewire drives for audio/video..

sbdj, when you say the video pauses, do you mean video will play but it freezes while the audio still continues? this is the issue i am having. when i play audio only, there is NO issues at ALL. but when i scratch videos (mostly .flv converted youtube videos)thats when the issues happen. just seeing if you have the same issue i have...


The only video issue I have is a brief pause in the video output when loading another video track.
 
Scott,
How does the DPC latency checker look on your Dell machine?
 
SBDJ wrote :
marctronixx wrote :
SBDJ wrote :
I use my M1730 without any audio problems - however it does suffer from the brief video pause unfortunately :(



i have a m1530 4gb, 512 nnvidia geforce, 2.54ghz dual core. i use firewire drives for audio/video..

sbdj, when you say the video pauses, do you mean video will play but it freezes while the audio still continues? this is the issue i am having. when i play audio only, there is NO issues at ALL. but when i scratch videos (mostly .flv converted youtube videos)thats when the issues happen. just seeing if you have the same issue i have...


The only video issue I have is a brief pause in the video output when loading another video track.



can you give me your specs and what types of hard drives you use? external usb? firewire?

can you scratch videos and they will not freeze?
 
My XPS M1730 is a 2.8GHz Core2Extreme with 2 x nVidia 880 GTX graphics cards. As I've said the video freeze makes it non-ideal for video mixing I'm afraid :(

DPC latency checker was all over the place under XP, huge red bars. This turned out to be a driver issue, and I loaded Vista as a test. DPC stays entirely in the green.

Drives used are two internal SATA-II 7200rpm drives.

Apart from this video freeze (and the huuuuge power supply) this machine has been perfect for me, CPU rarely going above 15%.
 
DJSoulman wrote :
He told me I would get a phone call today from Tech Support, still waiting after 3 hours!!! Grrrrrrrrrrrr!!!!!!!!!!


Guess what??? They never rang. Can't be bothered with another irrate expensive phone call, so, gonna fire off a huge email detailing everything thats happened and ask for a refund as was promised by one of the Tech support managers. Still can't believe the Dell 'engineer' made it worse and couldn't fix it!!!

TIP - The 'engineer' told me that support is better with an email because the Managers get a copy too.
 
SBDJ wrote :
My XPS M1730 is a 2.8GHz Core2Extreme with 2 x nVidia 880 GTX graphics cards. As I've said the video freeze makes it non-ideal for video mixing I'm afraid :(

DPC latency checker was all over the place under XP, huge red bars. This turned out to be a driver issue, and I loaded Vista as a test. DPC stays entirely in the green.

Drives used are two internal SATA-II 7200rpm drives.

Apart from this video freeze (and the huuuuge power supply) this machine has been perfect for me, CPU rarely going above 15%.



thank you.

let me clarify something you said. so under VISTA you have NO issues with video freezing? so you are able to load up videos and have no issues?

i can play a video and load another one up and my video thats currently playing will not freeze...

i dont have any red bars under XP that causes my issue. the video will just freeze while playing... do you know what specific drive was the issue? i apologize about asking so many questions but i think you are helping me more than hercules has on this issue. dell support will know nothing as experienced in this thread....

i may sell this laptop and get the 1730. the reason i didnt was because it was a "gamers" laptop and i dont do games... i thought i may have been wasting my money on certain features i would not user (such as overclock mode and such....)
 
No, I get the issue under both XP and Vista, but the machine was unstable under XP due to a driver issue.

If you're going to spend they money, I'm sure you could find a machine that works and doesn't have the video freeze.
 
yeah thats just it. i think we are all trying to find such a beast. im partial to dells and feel comfortable around them so i want to stay in that family. i dont like vista so i stay with XP. for those who have XP, have you upated to SP3? i have not yet done that update...
 
 
SBDJ- Sadly the only Dell systems and 2 Sony systems I have had or seen no audio/videos issues out of the box are with the Intel Integrated Video chips. I have my XPS m1330 (NVIDIA 8400GS shared ram) working great, took me almost 4 months. Haven't tested a XPS 1730, but I would think it would just work, no shared video/system ram, high quality card.

Soulman - I do know another DJ around town that is using a Dell Studio, I don't have his ph. number, but normally if DJ's around here have problems, I am normally the 1st ones they call. They always find my ph# number from somebody ((argg)). Saw a DJ I know last week that has a Dell Studio, he didnt mention any audio problems, he said it worked just fine. I think he has a VDJ and maybe the RMX. I beleive most of the DPC spikes issues are due to power management transitions of newer laptops. The desktops I have, I see lest than 100us, no spikes. Laptops, around 1000us. Most manufaturers are trying to get the most of processing power when needed, then thorttling the CPU or GPU down when idle, to increase battery life and lower heat. I miss the 2.8, 3.0 single core/desktop based processors laptops. I don' think they had any power management or almost none.


-David
 
yk23 wrote :
SBDJ- Sadly the only Dell systems and 2 Sony systems I have had or seen no audio/videos issues out of the box are with the Intel Integrated Video chips. I have my XPS m1330 (NVIDIA 8400GS shared ram) working great, took me almost 4 months. Haven't tested a XPS 1730, but I would think it would just work, no shared video/system ram, high quality card.


It does work, but as I said suffers from the video freeze with 2 x nVidia 8800 (GTX I think, I'm not in front of it right now). I'm reasonably efficient at troubleshooting these sort of things. XP was unacceptable - I was getting high CPU utilisation at idle. Some tracking revealed a driver was calling the kernel several million times a second to get the windows version, which was filling up the DPC queues. This was causing my CPU utilisation, and would have caused dropouts too had I tried to gig like this. Vista thankfully didn't have that problem, and since I was pushed for time I didn't mess around.

At some point I'm going to put it back to XP and resolve the driver issue.
 
I know this is kind of off topic, but does anyone have any problems with using HP Laptops w/ Virtual DJ?
 
Is the problem just with video or audio as well? I am actually waiting for the Fed Ex man to bring me my new Studio laptop and now I am worried!

Jorge
Miami
 
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