Aaron44126

I think it's normal to not have manual brightness control if you are using a "generic" graphics driver and not the "real" one, which would be the case if you boot into WinPE. You'd have to rely on the BIOS to set the brightness properly before WinPE boots, and if that is not possible, well then... 😕 (I'm only really familiar with Dell and they always have BIOS options to set the default brightness, both for AC power and battery power.) I also use Macrium Reflect. I only ever boot to WinPE to do a clone or restore (pretty uncommon). For doing a backup, you can do it right in Windows without booting separately to WinPE. Macrium Reflect uses Volume Shadow Copy to make a "snapshot" of your disk when the image process starts, so you can even continue working while the backup image is building without worry that it will do some kind of inconsistent backup. I have mine set on a schedule to run at night, backing up to a network drive.

I did the Windows 10 install myself. Very little Dell software installed. I do still have the stock OEM Windows 11 install available to boot from. Thermal/fan issues seem to be present in both, making me think a hardware issue rather than a software one.

That one was pretty clear-cut (IMO). I "caught" the NVIDIA audio driver gobbling CPU time on the "System" process and causing stutters in videos/games. The problem went away immediately when I disabled it. That's why I went to stub it out. (It is useless to me, I don't have any situation where the NVIDIA audio driver would actually be needed.) I will of course keep in mind that there may be another (deeper?) issue. Overall, I wish this system was a bit more solid, feels like I am always fighting with something. 😕

Man, you really don’t like that stub. It’s literally doing nothing, by design, except from prevent the NVIDIA HD audio driver from being loaded — as if the driver wasn’t even installed (except I don’t have a Device Manager error). In this case, the first crash was February 27, a few days before I implemented the stub. Of my hypothesis about the bad card is wrong, we’ll find out. In any case, I have been looking and see numerous cases reported of a bad card causing BSOD or other system issues. It doesn’t always result in “clean” read/write errors.

Yeah, I follow a similar procedure turning each screw just a little bit until they all bottom out. ————————————————— Had something else weird happen. I've been having some more unexplained crashes in recent days. Just this morning, the system went and just locked up. After forcing a reboot, the Dell BIOS really wanted to run a hardware diagnostics, even though I have the SupportAssist recovery options turned off in BIOS setup. So I dug in today and saw that the last thing showing up in Event Viewer before the crash is a PCIe device error: I checked out that device name PCI\VEN_8086&DEV_7ABA, and it turns out that it corresponds to the PCIe slot hosting the SD card reader. I've been running with an SD card inserted in order to facilitate moving files between different installed OS's (Windows 10, Windows 11, Linux) — and actually I rarely boot into one of the others so I don't use this often, but I've just left the SD card inserted so that I don't have to go looking for it in the case that I need it. I need something like this since I use BitLocker and I have it purposefully set up such that the OS's can't see each other's partitions. (I guess I could just make a tiny unencrypted shared partition.) The SD card in question is just 8GB and it's probably like 15 years old, so maybe it is flaking out? Can a misbehaving SD card take down the whole system .....? (Quick edit — Looking at some online stories, looks like the answer regarding whether a bad SD card can cause system crashes is "definitely yes". It would probably be less likely if the SD card reader was attached via USB and not direct PCIe.) Anyway, I just pulled the card out and I will run without and see if that takes care of the problem.

Check the first post, make sure you have the registry thing set to allow the driver to load, and if you do not, reboot after adding it.

Realtek audio driver https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=PPC6R Intel graphics driver https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=72D84 (Both just made public today, despite what the "release date" says) —————————— Over one week in and no hint of movement on my replacement cooler. Their estimated ship date is March 24, so another week to go. I've been thinking about it and I think it's possibly a paste pump-out issue. When I took the cooler off to repaste it seemed like an extremely barely there layer of paste was left between the CPU and the cooler. @win32asmguy mentioned something similar with the stock (Delta) cooler after repasting in the early days of this thread. I've been playing a more CPU-intensive game lately, so..... Anyway, if that is the case, hopefully the factory paste on the new cooler holds up better (I think it should).

Everyone has their own configuration and this sounds like it works for you. Can't say that I have run into that screen-not-waking-up issue. That's one thing that has been solid for me. (...I did have an issue with external displays not waking up, but that turned out to be the fault of the KVM I was using I think, it started working properly once I removed that from the loop.) I would suggest that you consider turning graphics switching on if you have it off, or off if you have it on, and see if that makes a difference (if you have not tried this yet). It will change which GPU your internal display is attached to. For reference, I have graphics switching on and all displays attached to the Intel GPU. Both my Precision 7560 and 7770 have (different) issues if I try to run with graphics switching off and NVIDIA GPU only. (...Also, I only use Intel and NVIDIA GPU drivers provided by Dell, I don't go upstream to get the "newer" ones from the source.) ... I personally tend to leave lots of applications open with running work for several days, so I try to minimize reboots. On my work system, I am generally successful at only rebooting once per month. I did not reboot between February 14 and March 14. ...I do it on the day that Microsoft releases Windows patches ("Patch Tuesday"), and I "save up" other updates that should go along with a reboot (driver updates / BIOS update / SQL Server / MS Visual Studio) and do them at the same time as the Windows patch. Up side: just one reboot per month. Down side: when there is an issue after patching (not very common), it might not be immediately obvious what exactly was the cause. ...I also tend to use "long term support" software update channels whenever possible to minimize the chances of issues / disruption. (I'm on Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC, Office 365 "semi-annual enterprise channel", Firefox ESR, ...). I like to be current with software but only to the point that the vendor is willing to commit to long-term support of a release. I used to enjoy being an early adopter, but I feel like Microsoft's QC quality for Windows has gone down in recent years and I got tired of being bit with issues. I also prefer to be in control of when feature updates happen rather than having them just dumped in randomly on a weekly/monthly basis. Anyway, because I expect my system to have long-term stability, a random hard lock is definitely unwelcome. It might have been caused by something other than the 1.20 BIOS update but the timing sure is suspicious. Since the 1.20 update doesn't actually address any security issues over 1.19 (at least that is according to the posted release notes), I don't have any qualms about rolling back and waiting for the next one. If it happens again, I'll start looking at other drivers that I just updated (linked a few posts up).

Ha, I was just trying to draw a connection with the "chicken and the egg" app problem, which despite Linux's obvious success in the server and workstation space is still keeping many "regular people" from using it as a desktop OS. Does it follow that because Microsoft and Adobe have a "partnership" to improve the experience of using their products together, that Adobe is not allowed to release software on Linux, if they want to? (It's clearly not stopping them from releasing their software for Apple products...)

I think maybe there is some confusion of Linus Torvalds (Linux guy) vs. Linus Tech Tips (YouTube channel / tech community)?

Upgraded to BIOS 1.20 yesterday. Today, I got a hard lock while working (not doing anything especially resource-intensive). Mouse unresponsive, keyboard unresponsive, system just frozen... and the fans revved up to max. Never encountered this before on this system. I had to hold the power button down to force the system off. ...Coincidence?... [Edit] Not chancing it, reverted to 1.19.

Not really. Linux was built from scratch with the intention providing a (mostly) UNIX-compatible user experience, but it was not directly derived from UNIX. I'm not sure if there is direct lineage between UNIX and XNU/Darwin (foundation of macOS), but macOS has received official "UNIX-compatible" certification since OS X 10.5. Practically speaking, they are certainly a lot closer to each other (functionally) than Windows is to either, and you can run a lot of Linux tooling on macOS without too much hassle. (Projects like MacPorts and Homebrew make it especially easy to get up and running with some things.) ...It doesn't especially help with the reverse, porting Mac apps to Linux. Most macOS GUI applications use Apple-specific UI frameworks and system libraries that don't exist on Linux. There is a fun project called Darling which aims to allow Mac apps to run on Linux (sort of like Wine allows running Windows apps). It's not progressing especially fast, but it is still in active development and apparently they can run "simple" GUI macOS apps now. I'm not aware of big software vendors (talking like Adobe, AutoDesk, Oracle, Corel, etc.) having "exclusivity deals" with either Microsoft or Apple, do you have any sources on this? Anyway you are right, it is very hard for another platform to get started up once the existing ones become entrenched. The same thing doomed Microsoft's phone OS efforts after the smartphone market got into high gear with the iPhone and Android phones. Microsoft tried really hard, but no matter what they did, no one would make apps for it because there were no users, and no users wanted to use it because there were no apps.

Does Intel have any way to set up game-specific profiles, sort of like what you can do in NVIDIA Control Panel? (I.e. To override a specific game's rendering behavior, set a framerate limit, or do some other things that the game might not have built-in options for.) I've never seen anything like this with Intel iGPU drivers.

I think it basically comes down to money and return-on-investment (or lack thereof). On one hand, it's obviously possible to build high-quality multi-platform software that runs on Linux in addition to Windows and macOS. (Look at Firefox/Chrome/Edge.) Fully realized complex but closed-source applications for Linux are also out there and making money (VMware Workstation, Microsoft SQL Server, ...). I saw this answer from someone who used to work at Adobe on his perception of why Adobe doesn't release their software for Linux. Why doesn't Adobe think of releasing its suite to Linux? I worked for Adobe as an engineer 5 years ago. I was not in on these meetings and my knowledge is out of date, but I can add a little info. First they do think about it. All the time. Adobe's customers are mostly creative, but inside we're mostly engineers who use Linux and support open software. (The PDF standard was opened and Flex from the start). But it just doesn't make businesses since. First, "Linux" is not just one OS, its many. Adding Linux support would be a huge -HUGE- engineering effort. And how many people would even buy it? To get an idea about how big an effort it would be, let's talk about testing. Just testing. Are you familiar with testing matrices? Thats when you get all the locals supported (eng, French, German, Japanese, Italian, ...) along one side. Then the operating systems (OSX, win 8, win 7, vista, XP) on another side. Then version on the other (stand alone, with creative suite, standard, pro, etc). Then the install path along another (clean install, update from last release, update from older release update from prev release with a different locale, etc). If you try to image that matrix, you'll notice there are more than 2 sides and a lot of frickin squares inside. If you add one more "row" say Ubuntu support as an OS, you add A LOT of tests. Enough that you need to hire new full time quality engineers. (Besides the regular engineers to add support in the first place). Does Adobe *have* to do all those tests? Yeah, pretty much. To not include different language support or to release a less-than-polished final product would hurt their brand more than just not supporting Linux. And remember, thats all assuming just one Linux flavor, say Ubuntu support. Would the BSD people still complain? Yes. Would Adobe sell enough Ubuntu versions to pay for all that additional engineering staff? Thats not my field, but I think probably not. They have *really* smart people who make those calculations and predictions. And thats why they don't support it. Again, I don't represent Abobe. This is just my impression of why, mostly based on hearsay from when I was there. Sort of a circular conundrum. For the businesses that create these big applications to consider making a Linux version, they have to perceive that the user base is there so that there actually is a return on investment. There aren't enough Linux users out there to buy a Linux version of Adobe CS and justify the cost of building it — which in some ways would be more complicated than building the Windows/macOS versions because of the variety of Linux distros/configurations out there. Oh, and the circular part is that the reason that there aren't enough Linux users is largely because such applications have not been built for Linux.

Check https://notebooktalk.net/attachments/ and see what is eating up your space.

You can visit this page to see what you have uploaded, what post it is attached to, see how much free space you have, and delete stuff. https://notebooktalk.net/attachments/ (I've gotta imagine the high-resolution PNG images posted in this thread are rather large and would quickly eat into the limit...) Once I realized that there was a limit on attachments, I just started hosting images externally. I also noticed that all you have to do is post the URL in the edit box; the forum editor will automatically transform it into an image and display it in-line, that's pretty nice.

The link posted in December still works. I updated the top post in this thread with the appropriate link.

Complex applications like this generally don't rank well with regards to compatibility with Wine. https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?iId=343&sClass=application https://appdb.winehq.org/objectManager.php?sClass=version&iId=35781 There are sometimes tweaks that you can do to make things work better for one application. Sometimes that will break things for other applications which is why you see people using Wine "prefixes" to basically run problematic Windows applications on their own Wine configuration. As I understand it, "Bottles" are basically a way to bundle Windows software with a tailored Wine configuration and maybe an easy installer, but that's about it, they can't magically make Wine work better. I'm not too deep into this, but my impression is that there has been way more work lately to get Wine working well with games (largely because of Valve's investments, paying the CodeWeavers guys to work on Proton), so the Windows-games-on-Linux space is in pretty good shape these days, but that work hasn't exactly translated to greatly improving support for professional applications like Adobe CS / MS Office / AutoDesk products / etc. If you want to switch to Linux but you are tied to these products, the outlook is bleak 😕 I would suggest that you look at some larger, more Linux-specific online communities and see if anyone has had luck with your software running in Wine. Otherwise, if you can't use open source alternatives, the other option would be to run it in a Windows VM on Linux, or remotely on another Windows system. (Sort of a shame that this isn't a "solved problem" by now. I fully realize that it is a complex problem, but at the same time, Wine has been around 30 years. I'd switch in a second if I could expect "most" Windows professional applications to work on Linux without hassle.)

Some recent driver updates. Ethernet https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=99KJH Intel RST https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=88DXV Intel Management Engine https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=PVT7D

If you unpack this "driver", there are ICC profiles for 15 different Alienware laptop display panels (Alienware x15 and x17). One of these panels is also used in my Precision 7770 so I was able to use this. https://www.dell.com/support/home/en-us/drivers/driversdetails?driverid=cwkg5&oscode=w2021&productcode=alienware-x17-r2-laptop (Don't know if they have similar packages for older Alienware systems...)

I've had a few cases where my 7770 did something similar and to fix it I can just unplug the AC adapter and plug it back in. ...But if this issue is specific to the new BIOS version, maybe best just to revert? You "shouldn't" have to worry about sudden throttling.

Well, I was wrong about the fan curves. Basically, I didn't wait long enough I guess. I tried using the "Quiet" profile for a while, and it did raise the fan speed by around 400 RPM over "Optimized" ... but when I left it on that profile for 10 minutes or so, it gradually settled down to around 200 RPM less than what "Optimized" had been running at (around 1500 RPM, same as I was at when I noticed this problem to begin with). So maybe it's not getting worse, but it's still worse than it was a month or so ago.

Yeah, I can hear it as soon as it hits 1400-1500 RPM. (It is pretty quiet in my home office.) Hearing it at that low level doesn't really bother me (though 2000+ starts to be an annoyance), what is bothering me is the fact that it is going up from what used to be the baseline and temperatures are higher than reasonable for components operating at low load. My Precision 7560 setup is pretty similar and it is running almost 20 °C cooler (also fully silent, fans hanging out at 1200 RPM and below — and they are smaller fans). I'm also using Process Lasso to switch Windows power profiles automatically (when I start a game or other demanding application) and a custom tool will notice the power profile has changed and automatically change Dell's thermal mode. I generally use ANC headphones for gaming so 3000+ RPM is inaudible in that case.

Yeah, generally I care more about low noise than low surface temperature. I don't think they don't have the "Quiet" fan curve quite right. It is louder than "Optimized" on an idle workload — at least in this situation where the CPU is running at an elevated temperature. ... But it does appropriately have a lower speed on high load (it won't easily go up to high RPMs while running on "Quiet"). And running "Quiet" will also cap dGPU performance (but I think "Cool" does that too).

Reasonably confident that it's not a software issue. Nevermind the fact that there is no CPU load contributing to this heat, and that the EC independently controls the fans (without help from a driver or other software running within the OS)... I can also reproduce it in my Windows 11 install, which I have as a dual-boot option for testing but haven't touched in months.