Phocus and Dell laptops

[cunim]

I have been running various versions of Phocus over the past year, all on W7/64 i7 machines. I use workstation PCs for post, and a Dell XPS16 laptop for tethered work.  All computers are i7 and pretty much SOTA.  Assume that the firewire adapter issues are sorted.

The PCs have been usable.  There are lots of idiosyncracies and little problems but at least I can get work done.  The laptop has been terrible.  Crashes to a required hard boot would occur at intervals from a few minutes to a half  hour.  Tethering was a nightmare.

Recently, Dell sent out a service bulletin that incorprates a bios update to allow the XPS16 graphics system to draw more power from the battery bus.  They will also ship an upgraded external power supply but I have not recieved that.  I have had two sessions of using the laptop without any hard boots required.  Yes, it still crashes every first run or if you do anything with the file structure or... but these are bugs, not bombs.  I have my fingers crossed.  Has anyone else seen a similar difference after the Dell bios upgrade?

[pchong]

I am using a Dell XPS Studio as well, but the i5-520 model. My machine has been stable with Phocus since 2.0, and the current 2.5.2 is good. Tethering has some setup issues...the computer sometimes does not recognise the camera, but when it does, it works well.

I don't think my Dell has any bios upgrade done...I am using the 95W power supply.