m15x win7 keyboard lag nvidia display driver crashing/recovering

I thought I was going mad or my typing was really bad. I have exactly the same problems with missing letters. I am not sure if it is just on battery I will do some experiments. It does seem to lessen the longer the laptop is on - I thought it was something not fitted properly?????

I'll do some more typing and let you know results.

Have dell commented? is this a known issue? I found posts from about a year ago on the internet but that was for the old model but the same problem.

Debs :emotion-6:

No, I have heard nothing.  Its really driving me nuts, I am considering returning the laptop because I consider it defective.  I am able to type normally on the laptop when it is plugged in at a normal pace.  If I unplug the thing and continue typing my typng loklik tis.  I am a computer programmer and this is absolutely unacceptable.  The guy who manages my company's relationship with Dell is on holidays, he returns the second week of november.  If the problem hasn't been solved by then, I will give the thing back to him and he can return it.  My company buys a couple hundred DELL computers a year so surely he will have enough pull to either get this solved, or get our money back.

If it gets solved, I'll post the solution here.  I asked for the m15x because I thought it would be an exceptional laptop, when its plugged in it is.  I use the thing on the commuter train everyday- its useless without a power plug.

Tim

Great news.  Dell released a bios upgrade that I immediately installed which solved the keyboard problem.  You can find it under Support.

The next problem that I am having is that video card driver is not consistently loading successfully during startup.  So, about 50% of the time when I power on my laptop the video drivers do not seem to load successfully.  It means that I can't use external monitors and Aero doesn't load.  My lack of external monitors is a real inconvenience.

The solution seems to be to reboot again, and again and most of the time it works.  Today (for example) I had to uninstall the driver, reboot and then re-install the driver, reboot and most of the time it works.  Then I just keep "sleep" my laptop so I don't have to reboot.

When it fails to load, if you look at device manager it shows the yellow ! for the display adapter (nvideo 240m).  If you look at the event viewer I saw errors with the OSD program, not sure if its a cause or the affect of the video card driver.  I renamed the path so it wouldn't load next time I reboot to see what happens.  Otherwise there isn't anything that I noticed that is particuarly interesting in the event viewer.  I am using R232178.

Interestingly, the Synaptics PS/2 Port TouchPad is also showing the yellow ! and the touch pad fails to work.  I can't see how its related, but re-installing the video card also solves the touchpad issue.  Weird, right?

While I am here... :)  Another thing I noticed is that when I use my external keyboard and I turn on the numlock, then sleep, the numlock is still ON even though the little light above the keyboard is off.  My password uses characters that come out as numbers when numlock is enabled.  So, my password was incorrect.  It took a few minutes for me to guess what the problem is.  Solution is to turn numlock on and then off again using the Fn + Delete.

If we can get this video problem solved, I'll be in paradise.

Tim

Thanks for the update. I emailed dell about this before I saw your reply - wonder what they'll come back with!

It did it again... I had to reboot after installing a new program.  When it came back up, no aero/no nvidia.  Attached is the screenshot of the device manager with the demonstrating what I talked about earlier, the touch pad fails when the video fails.   If I reboot over and over, eventually it usually works.  If i unstall the driver, reinstall it almost always works on reboot.

Tim

and for completeness, after rebooting several times without success, I uninstalled the video driver, reboot, reinstalled, reboot and its working until my next reboot... :(

I am using the latest Nvidia reference driver for my GTX260M, 197.13, and have not had any issues so you might want to try that.