Driven to distraction

I use a Dell Precision M4300 laptop for work - whilst not the lightest device around, it has sufficient horsepower and storage, and offers enough interfaces and screen real estate to cope with my various demands.

But since purchase it's been running slowly - Task Manager showed around 20-40% CPU utilization, all down to the System process.  Now this is a real can of worms, nearly everything that keeps the PC running is handled by this.  So I lost patience today and started to research the problem.

Turns out it's a fairly well known issue - Mark Russinovitch (he of Sysinternals fame) had already seen the same issue, and (being who he is) had figured out the cause.   Wonders will never cease - it turned out that it was the same driver, same symptoms and same cure that was effective for me.

This begs the question of why an issue that was known about a year ago (April 2008) has still not been addressed by Dell.  I was able to follow the Broadcomm links from Mark's blog entry to an updated driver for the NIC, but Dell's support site was less than helpful.  Once the new driver was installed, it was like working on a new PC - so much faster, better response to keyboard inputs, sheer luxury.  Imagine how much I would have appreciated it if Dell had taken the opportunity to  update their support site drivers to match.

Another issue on the same lines is the odd behaviour of the domain profile I use: apparently, this hasn't been updated on the server since around November of last year.  This means that changes I make on my desktop, for instance, are not reflected in the server copy, but files I thought I had deleted keep coming back: I have to log on to the server and delete the files from the copy there.  This one is weird: turns out it is a problem with the Nvidia display driver (for the FX 360M, a device that seems to be supported only by Dell, not Nvidia themselves) that screws up a couple of entries in the registry, a problem that only becomes apparent when you use Windows Server 2008 as a domain controller.  It just so happens that we switched to Server 2008 last November... Not sure if this latter problem is resolved yet, having already rebooted the PC several times to try and fix the NIC driver earlier in the day, I didn't get around to doing it again, so we'll see if the desktop reverts again tomorrow.  If so, I suspect the next step is to see if a laptop PC can develop wings in the short time it will take to fly across the office.