I fixed it! Thanks for all the good advice you gave me so far. To be honest none of the direct suggestions helped, even though I tried them almost all. What I didn't do was change the version of Intel Matrix Storage Manager. I simply had no such thing on my PC. Then I stumbled across this thread - forum.notebookreview.com/.../373925-dell-precision-m4400-latency-problem-already-read-all-proposed-solutions.html and one of the suggestions there was to install the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager. I downloaded off the Dell website one of the latest versions and voila.
Just checked my notes. Your model is somewhat related to the Latitude E series. Some things that helped folks witht hose models:
> Intel Matrix Storage Manager. There must have been a bad version because some people got rid of the noise by going to an older version of this and some by getting a newer version.
> one person (with an E6500 with an nVidia Quadro NVS 160M video chip) also wrote that the noise stopped when he rolled back the video driver from the 7.15.11.7607 A01 to the standard VGA driver in Vista.
> one person removed his optical drive and replaced it .
That model is a couple of years old. If the noise is something new that was not present when the laptop was new then restoring to the original factory configuration will fix it.
I have an "IDT High definition audio CODEC" as sound controller for which I have updated to the latest driver version.Even if I disable the controller from Device Manager the DPC Latency spikes still occur.
Excessive dpc latency is often caused by a poorly written driver, but it is not usually the audio driver that is the culprit. There are some instructions on the sycon site on how to attempt to track down a bad driver, but it doesn't always work.
Hi Jim, thanks for the feedback. Here are some answers from me
That model is a couple of years old. If the noise is something new that was not present when the laptop was new then restoring to the original factory configuration will fix it.
My company just gave me this laptop. I guess it was used by someone before, but not much and I was given a clean install.
Excessive dpc latency is often caused by a poorly written driver, but it is not usually the audio driver that is the culprit. There are some instructions on the sycon site on how to attempt to track down a bad driver, but it doesn't always work.
Is there any tool or set of instructions you can give me. I googled around, but haven't found anything that actually does driver diagnostics
> Intel Matrix Storage Manager. There must have been a bad version because some people got rid of the noise by going to an older version of this and some by getting a newer version.
Couldn't find anything like this on the PC.
> one person (with an E6500 with an nVidia Quadro NVS 160M video chip) also wrote that the noise stopped when he rolled back the video driver from the 7.15.11.7607 A01 to the standard VGA driver in Vista.
My graphics card is NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M, driver version is 8.15.11.8621. I am not sure what exactly I should do here.
> one person removed his optical drive and replaced it .
Not an option at this point :). Don't have anything to replace with.
Is there any tool or set of instructions you can give me. I googled around, but haven't found anything that actually does driver diagnostics
I forgot to mention that you should be running on a/c power and have all power management features turned off or set to max power. I don't know where they all are but if your nVidia control panel has "Powermizer", that is a known culprit and should be turned off, and if you have 3D it should be set to performance instead of quality. Changes like that should be made wherever you find power settings.
To do diagnosis, unplug everything you can from the laptop that will still allow it to work, and disable any unnecessary features in the BIOS if any, and terminate any unnecessary processes (I personally do this by disabling unnecessary services as recommended by the Black Viper http://www.blackviper.com/category/guides/service-configurations/ however I do not recommend that anybody else do it that way). Finally disable all non-essentials in things in Device Manager (the sycon.com site lists which ones to not disable). At that point, if the noise has stopped, then the culprit was one of the things you disabled or disconnected, so start adding them back one group at a time until the noise returns, then zero in on the culprit. Or you can do it the reverse way and disable things one at a time. It doesn't matter, but that is how you diagnose excessive dpc latency, by a process of elimination.
Ivaylo
5 Posts
1
August 13th, 2011 14:00
Hi Jim,
I fixed it! Thanks for all the good advice you gave me so far. To be honest none of the direct suggestions helped, even though I tried them almost all. What I didn't do was change the version of Intel Matrix Storage Manager. I simply had no such thing on my PC. Then I stumbled across this thread - forum.notebookreview.com/.../373925-dell-precision-m4400-latency-problem-already-read-all-proposed-solutions.html and one of the suggestions there was to install the latest Intel Matrix Storage Manager. I downloaded off the Dell website one of the latest versions and voila.
Thanks again :)
Ivo
Jim Coates
4 Operator
•
13.6K Posts
0
August 5th, 2011 12:00
Just checked my notes. Your model is somewhat related to the Latitude E series. Some things that helped folks witht hose models:
> Intel Matrix Storage Manager. There must have been a bad version because some people got rid of the noise by going to an older version of this and some by getting a newer version.
> one person (with an E6500 with an nVidia Quadro NVS 160M video chip) also wrote that the noise stopped when he rolled back the video driver from the 7.15.11.7607 A01 to the standard VGA driver in Vista.
> one person removed his optical drive and replaced it .
Jim Coates
4 Operator
•
13.6K Posts
0
August 5th, 2011 12:00
That model is a couple of years old. If the noise is something new that was not present when the laptop was new then restoring to the original factory configuration will fix it.
Excessive dpc latency is often caused by a poorly written driver, but it is not usually the audio driver that is the culprit. There are some instructions on the sycon site on how to attempt to track down a bad driver, but it doesn't always work.
Ivaylo
5 Posts
0
August 8th, 2011 14:00
Hi Jim, thanks for the feedback. Here are some answers from me
My company just gave me this laptop. I guess it was used by someone before, but not much and I was given a clean install.
Is there any tool or set of instructions you can give me. I googled around, but haven't found anything that actually does driver diagnostics
Couldn't find anything like this on the PC.
My graphics card is NVIDIA Quadro FX 770M, driver version is 8.15.11.8621. I am not sure what exactly I should do here.
Not an option at this point :). Don't have anything to replace with.
Jim Coates
4 Operator
•
13.6K Posts
0
August 8th, 2011 19:00
I forgot to mention that you should be running on a/c power and have all power management features turned off or set to max power. I don't know where they all are but if your nVidia control panel has "Powermizer", that is a known culprit and should be turned off, and if you have 3D it should be set to performance instead of quality. Changes like that should be made wherever you find power settings.
To do diagnosis, unplug everything you can from the laptop that will still allow it to work, and disable any unnecessary features in the BIOS if any, and terminate any unnecessary processes (I personally do this by disabling unnecessary services as recommended by the Black Viper http://www.blackviper.com/category/guides/service-configurations/ however I do not recommend that anybody else do it that way). Finally disable all non-essentials in things in Device Manager (the sycon.com site lists which ones to not disable). At that point, if the noise has stopped, then the culprit was one of the things you disabled or disconnected, so start adding them back one group at a time until the noise returns, then zero in on the culprit. Or you can do it the reverse way and disable things one at a time. It doesn't matter, but that is how you diagnose excessive dpc latency, by a process of elimination.
Jim Coates
4 Operator
•
13.6K Posts
0
August 13th, 2011 14:00
Well that is interesting. Thanks for letting me know. I will add it to my notes.