Month: April 2009

Broadcom B57nd60x 10.10.0.0 performance problems (Dell XPS especially)

CPU spikes were making my laptop less fun to use – a nice online guide and a quick bit of sleuthing with MS’s sysinternals tools and I soon had the answer. The laptop is now faster, quieter and has better battery life.

Excuse the title, but may as well make it easy to find.  I’d been experiencing problems with performance, whilst networking, with my Dell XPS M1330.

CPU Spikes

Basically, the CPU usage was spiking on a regular basis.  I could feel when playing games, and it was annoying.  It had started relatively recently, and the precise cause was unknown.  However, a bit of Googling and I found Mark Russinovich’s excellent overview of using Sysinternals Process Explorer and Kernrate to track down the root of this kind of spiky CPU usage.

And my problem was exactly the same.  Same driver, same version – the B57nd60x 10.10.0.0 driver was gobbling up CPU at a frightening rate.  However, although he’d reported the problem, at the time there was no solution and a new driver wasn’t available on the Dell website.  A year later, the driver still isn’t available – the Dell driver is resolutely stuck at v 10.10.0.0 – so, no fix.

Excessive CPU consumption = poor battery life

But it’s annoying seeing your CPU running constantly at 20%.  It also has an impact on battery life.

So I looked around a little further and found an updated driver to download at the the broadcom site, for version 11.7.3.0 – surely this would have a fix, as Broadcom were aware of the problem thanks to Mark’s excellent work.

And it worked – the screenshot below shows the impact – the first third or so shows the CPU usage with the old driver, and then it drops dramatically:

broadcom_driver_performance

That Dell haven’t updated their driver pack in over a year is something of a support fail – it makes the XPS M1330, at least in certain circumstances, somewhat less of a great PC than it could be.  And it’s also poor for the PC community – a lot of criticism is made of Windows being something that slows down over time.  It’s rarely the fault of Microsoft – often it’s driver issues, but finding the latest drivers isn’t easy for everyone, and it’s quite technical to solve.  MS could possibly make driver management a simpler system, but the PC makers could help by keeping up to date driver packs – especially for laptops which are rarely modified.

Just Go Back a Bit

There’s a question on a wall in Liverpool – “Would you like to die old and slow, or young and tragic?” But the more I think about it, the more I don’t know. This guy was definitely young and tragic.

Read this article on the BBC News site, and let’s imagine what they may have been thinking:

Here we have some young men, out for the day in a beautiful spot.

Seaton cliffs, by p_jolly at flickr
Seaton cliffs, by p_jolly at flickr

“Hey guys, you know what would be brilliant?  A picture of me that looks like I’m struggling to save myself from a dangerous fall!”

His friends then eagerly agree and point to a tuft of grass, “yeah! Just grab that grass there and dangle over the edge.  What’s the worst that can happen?”

And so, the grass gave way and young man – probably a fun and interesting young man, died.

I know that what I’m doing here is almost making light of a tragedy, but actually my intention is to point out that it’s an incredibly stupid way to die, which makes it even more of a tragedy.  This story illustrates a different kind of lack of thought to my popular target of politicians.  It’s about a guy who was just having a laugh.  He wanted to have some fun.  Like most people he was almost certainly a decent enough man.  He just didn’t measure up the risks properly.  A little thought might have saved him – and not just from himself, but from his friends who were a part of this.

There’s a question on a wall in Liverpool – “Would you like to die old and slow, or young and tragic?”  But the more I think about it, the more I don’t know.  This guy was definitely young and tragic.  I hope his friends and family get over it – they’ve learned the painful way.