madmax Posted November 5, 2013 Author Share Posted November 5, 2013 Hi Herve I kept the old dsdt file. So I changeant only the Chamäleon boot file and the smbios file together with the fake. Any attempt to just delete the obsolete kext resulted in a kernel panic. I ll keep testing Madmax Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rosmaniac Posted November 6, 2013 Share Posted November 6, 2013 Which BIOS version do you have? My M4300 currently runs BIOS A11, I haven't updated it yet to A17, which I think is the latest. For reference, there are two 'latest' BIOS's for M4300. If I go to dell.com and look for drivers and downloads for my specific service tag I see the latest BIOS as being A15; if I select for all M4300's I see A17 and A15 both available as the latest. I'm at A15; it appears A16 and A17 are mainly for signed BIOS updates, at least that's what the Dell info says. The easiest way to flash these if you don't have a Windows partition is made possible by using the OSX unetbootin package; use unetbootin to make a FreeDOS boot USB, then copy the BIOS update file(s) to that USB stick. You can then boot the USB, select no drivers and no install, and get the FreeDOS prompt. You can then execute the BIOS flasher there easily. (That's for reference, and for searches; Herve already knows how to do all this, I'm sure). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Hervé Posted November 6, 2013 Administrators Share Posted November 6, 2013 I do, but I usually prefer the easier/simpler method of the BIOS-extracted HDR file copied to a USB key/pen: take battery out unplug power cord plug USB pen in press and hold [END] key plug power cord in on red power LED, count 2s and release [END] key wait for BIOS update to complete and PC to reboot with new BIOS Works for D420/D430, D620/D630, D820/D830 and more... 'haven't tried on the M4300 yet, but I expect it to work since it's a very close cousin of the Latitude D Series. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Hervé Posted November 7, 2013 Administrators Share Posted November 7, 2013 Just updated the M4300 to BIOS A15 and A17 using above method, so I can confirm it works. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
madmax Posted November 7, 2013 Author Share Posted November 7, 2013 Hi, I was using A15 original. then I have flashed it to the version that was available here with Apple logo etc. That was based on the A15 as well. Madmax Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rosmaniac Posted November 30, 2013 Share Posted November 30, 2013 Madmax, Have you gotten this to work as yet? I just did tonight; man, what a difference! I do multitrack, DSP-intensive, audio processing. My M65/D820 with the T7500 was considerably and noticeably more responsive than my M4300 which has the 2.5GHz T9300. In particular, the audio stuttered badly on the M4300. With this /Extra, things are snappy on the M4300 now. The difference is night and day; before, mixing was basically impossible, and everything felt sluggish, but not now. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rosmaniac Posted December 2, 2013 Share Posted December 2, 2013 My M65/D820 with the T7500 was considerably and noticeably more responsive than my M4300 which has the 2.5GHz T9300. How much a difference I didn't realize, and in what area, until I refreshed my Windows 7 VM's Experience index. I run Windows 7 in VMware Fusion 6, the latest version. On Lion, on Fusion 6, and on the D820 with a T7500, the scores were: CPU: 4.3; RAM: 4.5; Graphics: 5.9; Gaming Graphics: 3.0; Hard Disk: 5.9. On Mav, on Fusion 6, and on the M4300 with a T9300, the scores for the same exact VM are: CPU: 4.5; RAM: 4.5; Graphics: 2.0; Gaming Graphics: 2.2; Hard Disk: 6.2. Those graphics numbers speak volumes; and the VM feels sluggish compared to the D820. It doesn't feel as sluggish with the native speedstep (MBP5,1) kexts and plists, but it still doesn't feel as snappy as the D820 with the slower T7500 CPU did, at least under VMware. The native OS X apps feel ok now, but I have to wonder what a graphics benchmark would show, D820 versus D830/M4300. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Hervé Posted December 2, 2013 Administrators Share Posted December 2, 2013 Not that it matters, but D820 does not support FSB-800 CPUs such as the T7500. That needs an Intel GM965/960 chipset. Gaming graphics will never be/score great on CAD-oriented GPU such as those fitted to M2300/M4300. You're not comparing Apple for Apple if I may dare the expression! You should do your test under Lion on your M4300 for the comparison to have real value... Then again, benchmarking hardware from an OS running in a VM is... peculiar. You ran Win7 in a VM on a PC under OS X? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rosmaniac Posted December 2, 2013 Share Posted December 2, 2013 Not that it matters, but D820 does not support FSB-800 CPUs such as the T7500. ... You're not comparing Apple for Apple if I may dare the expression! You should do your test under Lion on your M4300 for the comparison to have real value... Then again, benchmarking hardware from an OS running in a VM is... peculiar. You ran Win7 in a VM on a PC under OS X? T7400 is of course what I meant.... Touché. I know, I know, cross-comparing things is a bit baroque. Particularly using VMware to run Win 7 on OS X on a PC (yes, I thought about the irony....). The only way I'll run any Windows is in a VM; I also run Win7 under CentOS 6 Linux as a KVM guest. Snapshots and rollback are a virus's worst nightmares. The point that I'm at least attempting to make is that the M4300 felt slower than the D820. Significantly slower. The closest to an apples-to-apples test I could do is the Win 7 VM, since VMware presents the same abstraction layer regardless of version of OS X or the underlying hardware. So I could take an exact bit-for-bit clone and run on the newer hardware without triggering any device driver installs or other things that would make things not "equal." FWIW, I ran the 'Windows Experience' thing multiple times and got consistent results. Also FWIW Lion felt slow on the M4300, too. I actually did the M4300 EDP build with the drive in the D820; then I moved the drive to the M4300 and it booted right up. I then did an EDP update and another build, and I immediately noticed the audio had begun stuttering and the performance felt sluggish. I unfortunately didn't try the audio apps before doing the initial EDP update, though. I used the default M4300 EDP builds. I then did the upgrade to ML, which didn't go exactly smoothly (but that was my fault for not using the migration app). Thinking that the issue might be the way I just moved the drive over with the M4300 build prebuilt on the D820, and not being a scratch install, I then bought an HGST 1TB drive (inexpensive, fast, cool, quiet, and works well in the M4300) and did a scratch install of Mav on it, leaving a lot of room to SuperDuper! clone the ML install over to it and to have CentOS 6 as the third boot option. I got all that done, installed my audio apps in Mav (Harrison Consoles Mixbus and AudioFile Engineering's Triumph, to mention two), and immediately ran into the same performance and audio stuttering issues I have on the ML partition (Mixbus, which I use heavily, is basically totally unusable with the default EDP build for M4300, but works great with the default EDP build for D820). Out of a bit of desperation, since I had already given my wife the D820 to use in place of an ancient Sony Vaio Athlon XP laptop that had blown sparks the week before, I then purchased the T9300 and swapped for the T7700 that was in the M4300, but that didn't help either. That is, until I applied the fixes above that you provided, using the newer FakeSMC, etc. Now the audio apps work fine, and they feel as responsive as they used to on the D820. But the VM graphics performance is underwhelming, whereas the D820's VM performance wasn't bad at all. Perhaps it's VMware's abstraction layer not mapping as well to the FX 360M as it did to the NVS120M in the D820. More to look at there. And I need to do a direct comparison of something that would be OS-independent but intensive, like exporting a 2 hour long 16 track audio file from Mixbus, with iZotope Ozone displaying all the neat things that Ozone can display, and then timing the export over ten rounds or so. Export does seem to be faster on the M4300. Oh, and for the OP of this thread; my M4300 while docked right now is using the Ethernet port just fine, using the BCM5722D.kext that the default EDP build placed there. I have run into a few failed ethernet ports on several of the D-series laptops before; look at the contents of /Extra/Extensions and make sure that BCM5722D.kext is there. Sorry for the length of the post; I'm just trying to get across just how severe the performance problem was for me until using the fixes posted above. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Administrators Hervé Posted December 16, 2013 Administrators Share Posted December 16, 2013 WARNING: I only just noticed that since updating to BIOS A17, my T8300-based M4300 scored much lower in GeekBench (under 2470 for a test that lasts just over 2mins) than it were initially with BIOS A15 (over 3300 for a test that lasts just over 1min). I think it's therefore strongly advisable to stick to BIOS A15. To revert, I copied extracted HDR file M4300A15.hdr to a FAT32 formatted USB key (sole file on the key) and used the process listed above (battery out/power cable Out and In whilst pressing [END] key). M4300A15.hdr.zip Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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