M6500 freezes with black or a full bluescreen

Have you tried the drivers from the ATI site itself?   Others, in different threads, have mentioned that there have been issues with drivers lately and ATI supposedly has some newer drivers in Beta that are helping other people with freezing / locking up.    Some people also mention issues with Flash but that doesn't seem to be the problem on your system from what you list.

Hi,

Have you tried to disbale the Cyberlink Resident that loads at start-up ? (use msconfig for this).

Several users of M6500 have reported it to cause total freeze of the system.

Problem disapeared as soon as the Cyblerlink resident was no longer loaded

Hope this helps.

Kind Regads,

Hi
Sorry but join the club ! you are not on your own.
http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/p/19336090/19743938.aspx

Great find! My M6500 is over 4 years old now. I was having the same problem, but had it "fixed" under warranty years ago and it was running great since--still a monster.

Then a month ago I needed a new battery when the old one would not hold a charge. Black screens came back. DRAT!

Saw your post and all became clear. Once my battery was weakened with age, it just wasn't capable of generating the overheating problems.

Thanks for the inspiration!

FINALLY! 

Thank you. I did this a few weeks ago, and haven't had the machine crash or lockup since.  Prior to this fix it seemed like it was locking up a minimum of a few times a week. Thanks again.

I just tried your solution and I hope it works. I have the same issue on M6500 with Nvidia Quadro FX 3800. The screen goes black at random times and all I can do is hold the power button down and force a shutdown. This is driving me crazy. I had this laptop since 2010 and it never had an issue. I did reinstall the OS and this started happening right after and right when the battery started losing its charge. Here is what I have done so far...

- Upgraded Nvidia drivers, no luck. Went back to original driver and no luck either!
- I replaced the battery with OEM from Amazon - no luck and sometimes the system won't boot unless plugged in although battery is full!

Finally, I tried your solution and will update if this happens again.

Update 03/20/2015 - Hope this helps someone out there! I have finally figured out another solution to this. It all has to do with the Nvidia driver. The only driver that does not produce the random black screen is 8.16.11.8921 - 2/19/2010. It is the driver which actually shipped with earlier 2010 machines on the original recovery DVD and is also on the Dell website (The First Nvidia Driver Release). All other versions cause the random black screen. If you have updated the Nvidia driver from Microsoft Update, revert back to the original version and that should fix the issue. The only drawback is graphics performance loss with the old driver.

Dell and Nvidia should really do something about this. It seems like too many systems are having this issue. Like others mentioned, nothing shows up in log files or diagnostic tools which makes it almost impossible to figure out.

we have de same problems with a M6500 and we want to solve this issue.

Could you send me a link so we can download the files. On the recovery DVD of our M6500 we find another version (A01 - late sept 2010)

What worked for me was the comment by NetGuyCA on 5 Jun 2014 9:43 AM

I didn't follow his A, B, and C, so much, just 1, 2, 3, and 4.  I'm not certain if Nvidia still has the NVIDIA Power Mizer Manager software for download still, but it's available at other places.

The HWMonitor still seems to be available at the link, and is a nice temperature monitor. Initially i checked it fairly regularly, but not so much anymore. My GPU temps always show in the low 40s.

It's been about six months since I installed the NVIDIA Power Mizer Manager, over which time my M6500 with the Quadro FX2800M has crashed just a couple times, probably for other reasons.

Good luck.

NETGUYCA. You saved me some $$$. For more than a year I had this issue and I could not understand why, thought it was my video card and did not have the nerve to manually replace it. I did not bother with my M6500 and forgot about it until a month ago I came across your solution. I confirmed, It worked on battery only and black/blank out when on AC. I got the power mizer and voila! I did not post earlier as I really wanted to make sure my M6500 ran for a month (for 6+ hours :) a day ) without black (blank screen) outs.

So, I owe you something for bringing back my M6500. Thanks a lot!!

Oh.  My.  Gods.

THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!!!!!

I was having this issue with my M6500 from day one.  It was happening on Windows 7; I thought upgrading to Windows 8 would solve it.  It didn't.  I kept hoping it was software so upgraded to Windows 10, to no avail.  I updated and rolled back drivers, did a clean system reinstall, scoured the Internet... - you name it.  I finally reconciled myself to it being a hardware fault, but the thought of replacing the G.P.U., motherboard, and who knows what was just not an option, nor was selling it: The thing's worth a few hundred bucks now, and I paid well over a thousand for it back in 2012.  I was practically heartbroken because I love my M6500, but with the screen cr4pping out several times a day, it was unusable for any serious work.

I gave it one last shot to try to find a solution and came across this answer.  You did it!  I disabled the overheat shut-down, and the workstation has been purring like a kitten ever since: a week now with no problems.

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!

Hello netguyca,

I have the same problem with dell M6500.

I tried to find NVIDIA power mizer manager software in google search and yahoo search, but

there are not the download link. I couldn't find it,

Where did you find that software?

Please let me know.

Narabreeze:

I also had a helluva time finding it.  It's not available anywhere as a standalone file.  After much search I tracked it down and it was in a zip file.  I was apprehensive about downloading a zip file from a fishy source, but my desperation for a solution prevailed and I did it.  Luckily, it was legit.

I uploaded the .exe file to http://www.fileconvoy.com/dfl.php?id=g1aa139c171811074999819122c3b26fb16cef17ec

It'll be available for the next four weeks.

Best,

Michael

A better solution. 08-June-2016

Instead using NVIDIA power mizer manager (which could lead to poor graphic performance), we could use the official nvidia control panel and nvidia inspector.

This method only tested with Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 64bit 7601, Intel core i5 M560, 4GB Samung DDR3 and Nvidia Quardro FX 2800M (9.18.0013.4195 ver) 

1. Go to nvidia control settings > Manage 3D settings and set Power Manage Mode to:

Preferred Maximum Performance.

--Sorry for chinese locale Win7.

2. Download Nvidia inspector from guru3D. 

3. Did some trial and error for under clocking the GPU clock, mem clock and shader clock. Here is my settings, yet not optimized. 

And here the result, no black screen yet good graphic performance (not as good as the stock clock, but better than using NVIDIA power mizer manager.

-Benchmark tool: Final Fantasy XIV Heavensward Benchmark