Dell XPS 15 R2 - L502x - Owners Lounge

Dell XPS 15 L502x graphics freezes with charger plugged in

I am running a GT540M 2GB Graphics Card.

Freezes: When I play games with my laptop plugged in charging it freezes up and I cannot do anything; I have to shut my laptop off by holding the power button.

Runs Fine: However when I play games on the battery it is fine and does not freeze up.

I should also note that I have tried to back date my graphics driver and updating the BIOS, neither have worked.

What could the problem be?

Thanks

 

@jeff09

if you didnt tried yet.

try with this custom and undervolted BIOS

http://l502x.lag.re/L502X_A12_540m_83_85_Unlocked_Menus_v5.rar

flashing instructions and mod details are at this topic.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...modded-bioses-download-gpu-voltages-more.html

let me know if it still crashing

 

Unfortunately this has not helped

 

in that case, ensure the system is not overheating.

there are also some hardware mods detailed on that topic to improve stsbility and reduce crashes.

however the most easy (but also crappy) method to make crashes dissapear is to underclock the GPU to make the crashes dissapear

 

I've purchased a 6 cell battery JWPHF for my L502x and every time I turn on the machine it gives me this message:



The battery is not genuine, but a "high quality" copy. Should I return it or there's a way to fix this message?

 

Is there any setting to dim the hardware lights?

I mean these lights::
the "XPS" logo on the base behind the hinge; and the row of hardware lights above the keyboard, including the power switch, WiFi icon, Windows Mobility Centre button, Dell Instant Launch Manager button, and Waves Audio button?

 

I will try and repaste soon, NiVIDA Inspector I use to underclock and it works fine most of the time, but I do not want to have to do this all the time as I am not getting the most out of the PC and for most games it still crashes.

 

A solid year using Windows 8/8.1 and I must confess that I love the OS. The modern UI may be not as useful as I thought it would be when I first used it (I expected it to be akin to OS X notification centre and whilst it is, it still pales in actual usefulness). But, as someone pointed - Desktop side improvements in Windows 8/8.1 are fairly enough to make it a big step from Windows 7 - which I agree entirely with.

My only complaint is battery life. I expected it to rise, but it actually feel quite a bit. Have anyone experienced the same?
I don't know if it's due to Windows 8.1 itself or A12 bios is to blame, but whilst I used to get nearly good 6-7 hours using WiFi on Windows 7, now I'm well under 5 hours.

At first I thought that battery wear was to blame, but I noticed the drop just after installing Windows 8 a year go.
I've tried fresh installations or Captain Kassar's modded BIOS (which don't really matter outside games, as Optimus will use Intel's GPU on light usage) with no success.

More than a way to improve battery life, I'd really like to know if other L502X owners experienced the same problem. Sometimes I think that I may be a bit confused about how my battery actually behaved on Windows 7 and right know I'm unable to install it and measure battery to be entirely sure.

 

Hello good people, I'd want to ask what happened to the FN + F3 issue on Win8. I have it from like half a year and it still is not fixed. Haven't people already found a workaround? I know about the mobility center disable, but there are few issues with it:

1) Touchpad enables automatically after my screensaver goes on, and I have to disable it again after awakening the PC.

2) In windows 7 I activated mobility center with only touching the "gears" soft key, now it does the same as right clicking the start button. Is there a fix for this too?

 

What does it mean when the computer would crash with the charger plugged in but it wont crash when its running off the battery? I have the dell l502x and its unfortunate problems. I have my own theory to how this laptop can be fixed. People including me undervolt and underclock to be able to play games. Well by doing so, the computer doesn't use as much energy as it would on stock clocks and voltages. What if the only problem here is that the computer is simply not getting enough power thus would crash when for example the game starts too consume a lot of memory of the GPU and boom, crash. The alienware laptop that had the gt 540m graphics card had a 150watt charger compared to the dell l502x with the same graphic card but with a 130w charger. A simple solution would then be to simply buy a 150w charger for this computer. Im actually about to buy one and will reply if it worked perfectly for me. Anyone else thinks this could work?