Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

well, I found the correct torx wrench. It takes a T5 I believe. I removed the bottom and the hard-drive is fine and works correctly(tested it on another computer) and seated correctly which means after all this hassle the wiring in the laptop itself that connects the HD is bad....and it might because when they ship this it is literally in a handle box like if would be if you bought it in a store, no other protection or anything. So my laptop is being thrown around in a fedex truck for 6 days so I can get it not working.
So I apologize that I cannot answer any questions about anything since I was never able to get passed the BIOS.

I am sending this thing back and just buying a macbook pro to run windows on. At least with that I know exactly what I'm getting. This has been such an awful process I encourage anyone whos trying to order this to either wait until next year when they figure out what the hell theyre doing. Maybe also just get one of the other precision models as well. Such a shame, it was a very beautiful laptop the aesthetics of it alone I thought were better than the mbp. Too back nothing else followed through.

-M

 

I don't think there is an issue being fixed on the QHD+ units that is causing the delay. My own experience has led me to look elsewhere again, but Lenovo and others are also pushing order delivery out by 4 plus weeks for high end machines. This looks like a general supply and demand issue for high end components. Having read up on the early retina display issues with MBP and Adobe products which seem very similar to the ones users of the M3800 are experiencing I am tempted to stay with the M3800 and run at a lower res for now. Especially when you see that even the likes of the Lenovo Yoga 2 are now shipping with QHD screens.

 

same thing here: no more buying from Dell. The dell rep was calling me everyday before I ordered the laptop. I got the laptop and now I don't like the keyboard and I don't like the materiel around the keybaord. seems like it will be difficult to clean and it does catch dirt very easily. I sent an email to the same rep saying I wanted to return the laptop. No reply. i'v ebeen phoning her for 3 days, No reply. I called Dell customer support and they said the girl was there but she does not answer. They also said that return was not accepted because i bought as a company and not as a private customer !!! so I'm keeping it, maybe selling it soon. And I agree this would have been a a lot smoother process had I gone the MacbookPro way....

 

Thank you very much for your detailed response. I had suspected the noise was from a capacitor in the charge circuit as well, but since everyone was calling it coil whine I just assumed that was the case since I don't own the laptop myself and am merely doing some research before making the purchase. It seemed to me the whine would be coming from the laptop unit itself instead of the power brick. You mentioned a few of my concerns that I believe are indicative of larger problems.
Why is their capacitor whine in the first place? Did Dell cheap out on components?
Why is the VDC from the power brick so unclean? Is this just normal for the size of the power brick or a flaw in the rectifier? I've only seen measurements from desktop computer PSU so I don't know what is acceptable or typical for laptops.
What is the probability of a catastrophic failure of the capacitor in question? I have personal experience with a catastrophic failure of an electrolytic in a power audio amplifier. The cap in the amp was much larger, of course, but the point was that it took out a few components with it when it flashed, including a transistor.

Am I being overly concerned to feel that, at this point, extended warranties might be recommended for anyone purchasing either the M3800 and XPS 15?

 

It's some sort of irony that dell produced this creepy, pathetic spot: 'why creatives leave apple' and then this laptop and the windows 8 experience made me go for a macbook. It's actually not the build quality or the design. It's that you buy a product which is in a beta state and they already show off the new scaling in win 8.1. They should just choose a rgbled fhd panel and it would been great. This early adopting on new tech is nothing I do with a laptop I need for my daily business now.

I think all these problems are represented in the choice of the keyboard-font. Its readable but l: compare the letters E A R G their middle parts are in strange positions. When you look at high quality fonts they're optimised and the positions are in a relation to each other. This font is just in beta. And actually there's no reason not to take a solid font (or a great screen in fhd). This would be okay for casual use or a gaming laptop for 1500 € but I was expecting a mobile workstation. And I was expecting I could work with this right away.

The font is not so ugly, I don't know why there has been so much talk about it. I'm maybe a bit to focused on typography. The sad thing is, that InDesign and other type related softwares would profit from a high res.



That's the font. If you look at the rounded 'E' the '3' and the '4' you'll see inconsistency in design that would have made my typo-prof go crazy.

- here's the video mentioned above:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3TyswmRCdl8

i saw this before ordering the m3800 and already wondered why a company would release such a video. I can't imagine how somebody could react positive on that. After my m3800 experience im wondering even more.

 

Look at the XPS 15 page on the Dell US site. The slideshow at the top of the product page has a picture looking straight down at the keyboard and you can even zoom in two levels. The layout of the top row of function keys doesn't match the actual keyboard exactly (e.g. the production keyboard doesn't have an Eject button as shown since there's no optical drive) but the font and layout otherwise is accurate.

 

Could you please provide a link? I can't find it.

 

Umm, ok... XPS 15 Touch Screen Laptop Details | Dell. You just click For Home > Laptops, then go to the "Premium Design" option, or after entering the Home store, just click Shop > Laptops > NEW XPS 15. Note that you need Flash Player to see the slideshow at the top. Keyboard photo is second to last.

 

Hi guys, I am waiting on my top tier M3800 model expected sometime next month. I am an architect and will be mostly using Sketch Up 8 Pro and Autodesk, some rendering software and of course Office software. I was wondering if I will be getting Scaling problems with the HiDPI screen.
I am not really into gaming, but I do a lot of modeling on my machine. Most of the rendering is done by the designers at the office on desktops. so I am hoping that I will not be too affected by this until as you said the software catches up. I work a lot on the main unit screen, but am also connected to a 27" HD screen at the office.

Can someone please give me at least an idea on what to expect?
Many thanks...

 

Your experience will depend entirely on the particular apps you use. Office works fine, not sure about SketchUp Pro, and Autodesk is a vendor name, not a specific application. In any case, you'd likely be better off Googling "(App name) HiDPI" and finding posts in forum threads related specifically to the Windows versions of those products. However, even that way you may not find much even since HiDPI is still relatively new to Windows, especially on performance workstations, so it's possible few people have tried your app on this type of panel. In that case I would send an email to the support address of the vendor who provides the software asking them if they can give you a sense of what to expect.

In terms of running your built-in panel alongside a 27" display, if you use the 27" as primary, content on your built-in panel will essentially be zoomed in to compensate and show it at the proper physical size rather than using the same number of pixels. That doesn't look great, to be honest, because the content is simply blown up rather than sharpened. If on the other hand you use the built-in panel as primary, content will be zoomed OUT when dragged onto your 27" panel. That actually looks pretty reasonable because it started as higher-resolution content in the first place. It's still not as good as actually optimizing for the 27" panel, but it's far better than the reverse operation. Of course that requires that you actually set your built-in panel as primary in that setup, which may or may not be ideal for you. Unfortunately this situation of having to choose between optimizing for one pixel density or the other but not both at the same time is just the way it is at the moment on both Windows and Mac, because being able to optimize for both simultaneously would require a HUGE amount of work for software devs in order to allow their app to dynamically re-draw itself and potentially use other graphics assets when moved from a display with one pixel density display to another -- which won't happen because once desktop HiDPI panels become more widespread and used alongside laptop HiDPI panels, this whole problem will go away since a single scaling factor would then be appropriate for both displays, meaning that effort would be a lot of work to solve a temporary problem. The only enhancement the Mac side has over Windows to this optimization compromise situation is that you can choose to have it optimize for a non-primary display, which you can't (currently) do in Windows, unfortunately.

If you can get your firm to spring for a desktop 4K display for you (like either of the two Dell just released), you won't have to worry about the optimization compromise, though of course if you have an app that doesn't scale well, you then wouldn't be able to use it effectively on either panel. If none of the options I've just described work for you, the last-resort option would be to actually run your built-in panel at 1600x900, which would then allow you to use regular 100% scaling and have everything look right on both panels, but of course that eliminates the benefit of QHD+ -- though if you want to have the hardware ready for when the software improvements arrive, maybe that temporary solution would work for you.