I completely agree.

I recently bought a 1730, largely to play Unreal Tournament 3 on.  The game plays smoothly, except for hitches every minute or so that last about 5 seconds. I's *VERY* annoying.  It's honestly game breaker for me.

This is a known issue with an older desktop Nvidia driver.  The 169.28 fix the issue.  Dell hasn't released a driver for our laptops since early February.  What gives?

Dell, please respond.  Thank you for your time.

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@cebalrai wrote:

 

Dell, please respond.

 

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I wouldn't hold you breath meantime :smileyvery-happy:

I've yet to see a single post from a Dell support rep' on these forums - other than the threads they put up, in which they ask us to answer users' questions :smileysurprised:

cebalrai on your 1730 have you got 8700sli or 8800sli?, Nvidia do Beta's for the 8700sli and it wasn't until i used them that i could even play UT3 or Crysis... Also I used to have a T7700 C2D in my 1730 which lagged badly with above games but now with an Extreme CPU at 3.2Ghz all games super smooth no lagging

Although still buggy and a case of having to remove and reload them on @least once a month, games now run fine for me, but others on forum have had no end of trouble probably time to get a PS3 for gaming!!

It's a joke for a premium gaming laptop to have the problems all the new XPS range seem to have, the previous generation shaev been so much better, now seems to have all gone downhill :(

D3l1r1us

XPS M1730 - Vista Ultimate 64bit
Core 2 Extreme X7800, 4GB Crucial, 2x256MB Nvidia 8700M GT SLi, Ageia PhysX
2 x 7200rpm 160GB HDD's RAID 0, 8x Super-Multi DVD±RW
Creative SB Audigy Advanced HD Audio (Broken ), Intel Next-Gen Wireless

XPS M1710 - Vista Ultimate 64bit

Core 2 Duo T7600, 4GB Crucial, 512MB Nvidia 7900 GTX

1 x 7200rpm 160GB HDD, 8x Multi DVD±RW

Intel pro wireless 3945

XPS M170 - Vista ultimate 32bit

Pentium M 770, 4GB Crucial, 256MB Nvidia 6800 Ultra

1 x 7200rpm 120GB HDD, 8 x DVD±RW

Internal Gigabit Ethernet

HP Proliant ML370 G5 server - VMWare ESX 2.5 Server

2 x Quad core Xeon 3Ghz, 32GB Crucial,

1.1TB SAS HDD, DVD-Rom

4 x gigabit Ethernet

Also...

Dual 200 GB HDs w/RAID 0

Windows Home Premium

Like I said, UT3 runs very well.  The glitch where it hangs though is VERY annoying, and it makes me perform poorly in the game.

Dell XPS 1730

Core 2 Extreme @ 2.8 ghz

4 GB RAM

Dual GeForce 8800 GTX w/SLI 

PhysX chip

I was hoping the 8800 had better drivers and was looking foward to the upgrade kit, oh will perhaps its time to look at sager's/Rocks notebooks, but think check out their forums first.  

Also UT3 hanging even on latest patch level still seems to be a problem, alot of the maps have dodgy areas where any platform appears to just crash, so maybe its the game rather than the cards, do you get the problems in any other games?

I've only tried Guild Wars and Galactic Civ II on this rig, so it hasn't really been pushed aside from UT3.  But those games work without any problems at all.

According to UT3 tech support forums, a more recent desktop Nvidia driver addressed the issue.  But who knows, maybe it's the game.....

After a couple hours of poking around on laptop2go.com, I managed to install a 174.74 driver for my XPS 1730.  Not only is the UT3 hitching issue completely gone, but the whole game plays a lot smoother. 

DELL WAKE UP!  Give us some decent drivers for pete's sake!  You're selling these XPS laptops as gaming rigs and then give us horrible drivers to use!

We shouldn't have to use unofficial, hacked drivers in order to get the full value of our purchase...

Another customer dissatisfied with the amount of driver updates here. I would have seriously re-considered purchasing my m1730 had I been aware of this beforehand, and will be advising others to avoid "gaming" laptops in future.

Thanks for letting us know about laptopvideo2go.com, hopefully I can use that to get my drivers updated.

It's a great website.  It took me a little while to figure things out, but it basically boils down to getting a driver off their site, getting the modified .inf file to stick in the extracted driver folder, uninstalling the current driver, then installing the one you just got.

Look in their forum under SLI laptops for details.  There's a sticky post at the top of it with step-by-step instructions.