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taoshen1983:
Nobody should be running less than 4GB of ram on their new laptopsand 64bit OS today(even for 32bit backward compatibility.)
taoshen1983, are those your words? I added emphasis to the part I am having an issue with — what you said basically means that when buying a new laptop people should shell out for 4GB of RAM whether they need it or not.
First of all, your point that 800 dollars is someone's 2 months worth of salary is irrelevant since we are not talking about the cost of the laptop, but the cost of adding 4GB of memory.
On the contrary, it is very relevant — $80 is 10% of a laptop cost as you say, but it is also a 20% of someone's $400 monthly salary. Besides, do you really think that people would not buy a laptop with 4GB installed to begin with if they had enough money to spare? Please use your brain cells.
Once you hit the swap in Vmware or MySQL, you are screwed. The fact that you say i am self-centered for recommending a 4GB configuration is baseless.
Wrong again. 90% of people do not use MySQL and VMWare so you are self-centered for taking those as an example of a typical laptop workload. Also, your tone ("Nobody should be running...") doesn't sound recommending but demanding instead. Perhaps it is the language barrier?
Lastly, if I am too soon to jump to conclusions, you are an Intel employee located outside of United States.
You are jumping indeed... I am not an Intel employee, just a regular software engineer dealing with code optimization who by sheer misfortune lives in a poor country with a lot of poor people around — that allows me to also see things from a perspective different than your own.
And Bill Gates did say 640K is enough. You can google it. Igor
So can you, but seems you didn't — here, look under Misattributed.
Getting back to the issue at hand — if I were you, I would at least try the development branch of Compiz to see if it improves anything and make sure they are at least aware of the issue if it doesn't. As for the Dell drivers, nobody is forcing you to use those — go here, and get the latest Intel drivers for GMA965.
Yesterday, Dell released a new BIOS version (A11) for the XPS M1330 notebooks. Has anybody with such a machine already testet, if it fixes the problem there?
Unfortunately the A11 BIOS does NOT contain the fix. I tested it (and I knew by reading the changelog).
I have a small script that gives me every morning the new BIOS versions:
ftp -A -s:get_dir.txt ftp.dell.com >updates.txt
diff baseline.txt updates.txt
Therefore I'm watching D530/630/830, Vostro 1400 etc.
I was told the fix entered release pipeline, but as we can see: It didn't or got delayed. It's more than 4 weeks ago since a fix was known.
Thus I got back in touch with Dell and they will update me on the expected release date.
Do you have any idea when this BIOS update will be available for XPS M1330?
Please read this posting (especially the note 06/23/2008):
http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/Community/en-US/forums/permalink/30257484/30255221/ShowThread.aspx#30255221
Dell is definitly working on it and I expect a release very soon. I received a testing bios, which has this bug already fixed. I'm not allowed to share this one though. Instead I'm pushing Dell to release a public fix. Meaning it looks they got more customer complains about this issue, which might speed up the process.
I assume there is no Vista 64 bit version of these for a 1330:
7.14.10.1272 (v15.2.6)
7.14.10.1268 (v15.4.1)
7.14.10.1255 (v15.4)
7.14.10.1253 (v15.2.4)
I found these:
7.14.10.1255 (v15.4) for Vista64
7.14.10.1253 (v15.2.4) for Vista64
Basically what you can do to get more updated drivers is to search the support homepages of HP, ThinkPad etc. for their professional products and use their drivers. Only the professional product line will feature Vista64 drivers.
They posted a "new" GM965 driver on their site ( 7.14.10.1409) which of course has the bug. I wasted another 15 min to test the driver. It is unbelievable that they do nothing for fixing the bug but instead they agravate it.
You're right Dell's updated driver is just 7.14.10.1409 (v15.7.3) dated 01/11/2008, which has this bug.
It's now ~7 weeks since I received a bugfix from Dell and they didn't release it yet to public. The last weeks I did asked for status update several times:
http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/isn/Community/en-US/forums/permalink/30258498/30255221/ShowThread.aspx#30255221
For some reason the Dell processes in this case didn't work out the way they are supposed to work out. Recognizing that I just wrote an e-mail to Dell support and asking for an escalation strategy on this issue. If I don't receive an adequate answer shortly, I'll use other channels.
reply from Dell received 08/07/2008:
Mr. XXX is currently out of the office until july XXth.
I see the issue has been escalated to our product/engineering group, which is responsible for implementing updates. They already are working on a solution for M1330 and D830 too.
And the Vostro 1500 :(
I included a list of notebooks, which are still waiting for a BIOS update in the top posting. There are some notebooks, whose status I can't tell e.g. whether those are affected by this bug or not. If you have any information regarding those, please post.
If you want to speed up the process of making a bugfix BIOS available, please file a bugreport at Dell technical service. They most likely will ask you to run Dell diagnostics and suggest all kinds of hardware exchanges (motherboard, memory, harddrive). Run Dell diagnostics, but don't agree on (wasteless) hardware exhanges. Emphasize how critical this bug is (data loss, data corruption, ...) and that it helped for other Dell notebooks to provide this BIOS fix:
"Update GM965 Graphics VBIOS from 1466 to 1588"
Then a couple of things will happen:
. Dell will agree on this being a problem and a solution. If they don't asked them to replay the memtest scenario and see it fails on their machines.
. Dell will get awareness of this bug and/or change priority regarding this bugfix.
. If you're lucky Dell will inform you about the ETA.
The priority Dell gives to this bugfix will most likely depend on the quality of you bugreport and the total number of bugreports they receive regarding this bug. The more, the better, the faster.
Thanks for the detailed answer 7oby. I already knew that Windows XP is fine with any VBIOS / driver combo since that is what I am currently running, I was just wondering what is safe for those who might want to install Vista on it.
I am pretty much annoyed that we the users have been turned into free hardware beta testers these days. I mean, beta testing software and even drivers is ok you read the EULA, click on that "I agree" button and risk it if you want so.
What is not ok in my opinion is making hardware products which weren't sufficiently tested and which have buggy BIOS or firmware. You pay for the final product and it is not what you are getting. For beta software and drivers you expect failures, but for the hardware you dearly paid for such as laptop you don't, and since you are not prepared you always end up with some loss, be it data, money, time, nerves, etc.
In my opinion industry should be reminded that in the days of PC/XT BIOS chip was soldered to the mainboard and it wasn't programmable, yet those computers worked just fine.
Good Job, Dell/Intel Engineers. A09 bios is the fix. Thanks
As for you Igor:
It is obvious that the hardware is working and you fail to see that even working hardware could have buggy firmware which is software. Today's definition of hardware is becoming blurred against software since all hardware must be written in HDL(hardware description language) first. Before the ICs are fabricated, hardware IS software. So yes, we are all beta testers for all the hardware we buy now just like software. I am surprised to see you, a software engineer, arguing that beta testing is not acceptable.
As for the PC/XT BIOS chips and non programmable firmwares, we have to remember that the complexity of hardware is growing at the rate of Moore's Law, meaning that transistor count of today's hardware is more than 1000 times the complexity of 90s hardware. However, engineers haven't gained 1000 times worth of brain matter. Instead of having a brain 1000 times the complexity, we spend time on the internet arguing that 4GB of ram is too much for a laptop. So I am not sure industry should be reminded of the old days. They are trying as hard as they can. This one is a matter of size of regression.
For this case, Dell finally pulled it off after like a year. So congrats, Dell, and Intel. Lesson learned: don't stop bugging the people who are responsible until they take notice.
