Dell D531 laptop problem

[difinity]

Hello, we have about 150 Dell D531 laptops in our college. Trolleys for students and also staff have them to. Recently some of them would be really slow on boot up and in windows. I tracked it down to the Primary IDE reverting to PIO mode, i uninstall it, restart the laptop and UDMA is now enabled.

 

My question is does anyone know why this is happening, its not all of the laptops, just 1s and 2s here and there.

 

Cheers

 

Michael

[AngryTechnician]

I think I might know this one. Are they running XP or earlier (i.e. not Vista)?

[FN-GM]

DO they have the latest BIOS?

[difinity]

Morning, they are running XP with SP3 and not, its no the latest BIOS, we have A04 and the latest is A08. Edited May 6, 2009 by difinity

[AngryTechnician]

This is almost certainly what is causing it. Windows monitors IDE devices for errors, and if it encounters enough of them over a certain period, will bump the drive down to PIO, with no notification.

 

The monitoring was made less aggressive in XP SP2, but you have to enable the change via a registry setting, as described in the article.

 

I still see the symptoms from time to time even with SP3, though primarily on DVD drives, as the disk skipping during playback while the laptop is being moved counts as an error. The user's complaint is normally DVD playback has suddenly started to be very choppy.

Edited May 6, 2009 by AngryTechnician
Note that registry changes are required even with SP2

[difinity]

It's been mostly student laptops that have been causing the problem, and they have an extra battery rather than a DVD drive, however at the top of that article they mention supend and resume problems, so i think that's it....cheers.

[FN-GM]

I would update the BIOS and see what happens its only a quick .exe file that needs to be run.