Drivers, Drivers, Drivers

Forget that weak Respawn restore process and just wipe it clean using the Dell disc you got and see what happens

i cannot get my 6900m's working at all.

After i tried installing the preview 2's both my cards seem dead. Not heat at all coming from them either. I think im using onboard intel display.  I think the preview 2's destroyed my system.  I just got it from fedex this morning also....

device manager doesnt find them either. I tried respawn and still no video cards in device manager

Can't believe drivers would hose your chips like that... did you try doing a fresh install off the restore disc? Were you overclocking the system or 6990s at all?

nothing works. my video cards are cold and dead. My laptop cant detect them and i get install errors when installing catalyst. Catalyst cant detect my 6990m's

Hi NoForever,

Remember that built into the laptops is the capability to switch between embedded graphics and discrete graphics (AMD cards) by doing "FN" + "F7 (I/D GFX).  There will be a pop-up, follow what it says and then there will be a restart.  Perhaps this will switch off of the Intel graphics back to standard VGA drivers with your discrete graphics.  Check to see what device manager says.  Maybe then you can re-install the appropriate drivers.  This functionality is why the standard AMD detect and install will not do it for you.  Please let me know what happens.

Just talked with alienware support. My 6990m's are fried. They are going to send me a new m18x i might beable to go with the 580 gtx's in sli for upgrade. Anyways i just got this new laptop yesterday morning geez.

as of right now is it better to go with nvidia cards? Does dell give more up to date drivers for nvidia cards more often then ati's?

You'll pay a lot more for the NVIDIA chips, but they are good chips, no doubt about it. All I can say is, you probably had some faulty hardware from the onset. I'm running the 11.9 drivers I got straight from AMD with no install issues at all... bear in mind, I did a clean install of 7 64-bit from a retail Ultimate disc, so I never had any remnants of the original Dell drivers anywhere... the drivers and 6900M chips do run real good, so I'm guessing you had some hardware that was destined for failure sooner or later... that and it could have just been those beta drivers, that's why I'm waiting for the official 11.10 release drivers.

An interesting thing to do would be to download a driver from Dell, and then get same (older) version from ATI or nVidia, and compare them. The key differences will most likely be in the INF files (open these as text file using Windows Notepad), and then look at what Dell changes from the manufacturer's default spec INF configuration.

Is more than one Dell driver download available? So repeat the process, comparing the new and old Dell drivers. Are there any significant INF changes between them? If NO, then it is probably safe to simply reuse those INF configration additions for the next OEM driver that becomes available.

Okay hot new driver version comes out? So apply Dell's INF differences from the previous driver version(s) to the new one.

,

Single-file driver download executables are in most cases really just compressed file archives. The free decompression utility 7-Zip can upack EXE's to a folder, and then you can run the installer using the unpacked files. (Sometimes there are further archives to unpack, one inside the other, to find the actual installer files.)

Though, heh, this is a suggestion only. Do this hacking at your own risk, etc etc.

I heard someone say something that sounded like this to me before. It sounds promising. But the only problem I have is I'm dumber as hell when it comes to this stuff. I know nothing about computers. That's why I bought a nice, expensive Alienware in hopes that I wouldn't have to worry about messing with this kind of stuff. So, in short, can you do a "For Dummies" of what you just said? And by that, I mean seriously, imagine we're like in 3rd grade. I know pretty much nothing about them. Thanks.

This is my 3rd high end expensive Alienware laptop.  Due to this 'drive update issue' I will NEVER by an alienware system again!!

I have downloaded and used Nvidia drivers direct from Nvidia without any problem for my M18X with the 580M cards, you have to download the laptop video drier and not the desktop version from Nvidia website............they have both..........I am sure it's the same for the 560M cards.

Agreed. I now have an M18x with two 580Ms (traded the machine with the two nightmare 6990Ms) and the machine has been an absolute joy to have now... from day one, I reformatted my machine with an MSDN copy of 7 64-bit and have run the NVIDIA drivers off their site since day one and it's always flawless and never an issue at all updating... I even run the beta driver updates with no problems.