Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

I thought all the mSata versions come with a 91Whr battery? I may be wrong though.

Regardless, if you are not using a 2.5" drive then there should be plenty of room for the 91Whr battery. You just need to get your hands on one now. The only time you cannot use the 91Whr battery for sure is when you are using a 2.5" drive.

Be sure to contact DELL first to confirm though. I'm just going off of what I have gathered from reading this thread.

 

Nice to hear that you finaly got your computer after 4 months of waiting, I am surpriced you managed to get the large size battery, in my country (Denmark) it was not an option, maybe a bonus for waiting. Do you have the actuel weight as you write it is more than 2.0 kg. ?

Tanks for your review.

 

No tricks to it if you have a non-caching SSD to start with in the mSATA slot, which means your SATA mode will be correct out of the box. It'll be just like any other system with multiple drives.

And the touchpad improves when you install the latest drivers (which weren't necessarily installed on your system) as well as the touchscreen firmware update, which for some reason also updates the touchpad.

It's a direct swap if you remove the 2.5" bracket and SATA cable. The problem thus far is that nobody has gotten Dell Spare Parts to sell them one, and many have tried.

Go into the Intel Rapid Start application in Windows and switch it to Off.

You can then also delete the 8GB hibernation partition and re-enable regular hibernation from an elevated Command Prompt by entering "powercfg -h on".

 

Nope. Available configurations vary by geographic market, and people with access to Premier accounts can customize.

 

Go back to Pages 214-215 in this thread. Some people can't be bothered to learn Win8 since they feel it offers them no benefit (possible) and that effort learning Win8 will be wasted because (they think) Microsoft will completely replace everything new about Win8 when Win9 is released, even though a cursory glance over the evolution of Windows reveals that at least since Windows 95 and NT4 they've never completely replaced entire interfaces to the point that being familiar with the immediately preceding version didn't make the learning curve less painful -- just as knowing Vista made Win7 easier to adjust to, incidentally. And if anything, they're moving more towards Apple's release strategy of more frequent releases with fewer changes per release (see Win8.0 and now 8.1), so the version to version changes going forward will likely become less substantial than history indicates, not more. Different strokes, I guess.

I tried 8.0 twice and hated it both times enough that I got rid of it in less time than it took me to get it installed, but I'm happily using 8.1 now and enjoying the benefits I already listed in my posts in the aforementioned pages. And the Windows 8.1 Update 1 patch coming out next month should only make things better. Once you enable log on to Desktop rather than Start, realize that the Start screen is just a better version of Pinned Items on the Win7 Start menu, and discover that the All Apps view is just like the Win7 Start menu, things are mostly the same and you can otherwise completely ignore Metro if you have no use for it. Sure there are some things they've changes or removed that are mildly irritating, but I've also found lots of stuff that I really like. People hated Windows 95 when it came out too and pined for the 3.1 interface. Same with Office 2007's Ribbon interface. Life goes on.

 

Switched routers and now happy with WiFi.

Even after the WiFi update for Win 7, my M3800 would not talk to my router for more than 15 or 20 minutes without reconnecting and often power cycling the router.

I decided to quite trying to make the marriage work, and dumped the router (Cisco/Linksys WirelessN a couple of years old) and upgraded to the ASCUS RT-AC68U. It is blazing fast. the connection is stable. It is upstairs next to the desktop. Downstairs, with 2 laptops streaming youtube, the smart TV streaming Netflix, and a phone and an iPad connected to the network and all are working simultaneously.

So, this is happy.

 

This one is fascinating. I wonder if you have any kind of evidence, anything at all, anywhere on the internet, that would document the existence of a non-negligible group that would correspond to the "they" you are referring to. We're on the edges of our seats.

Some nice made-up analogy there, but that's far off-topic so I won't say much more, other than noting that the Windows 3.1 interface had become a sad joke years before Windows 95 came out. It was for this reason that there existed a very healthy industry of third-party desktop interfaces, such as PC Tools for Windows, Norton Desktop, etc.

 

It must not be installed on my computer. The first thing I did was search for the program from the start menu, but it doesn't come up.

I also just checked on the Dell drivers page and there is no Intel Rapid Start application: Drivers & Downloads | Dell US

 

Interesting. Well it's definitely supported on the M3800 and the app is available on the XPS 15 site, but if it's not currently installed then it's definitely not causing your issues. Have you gotten the latest drivers for your GPU (both of them) and Wifi adapter direct from NVIDIA and Intel? If so or that doesn't fix it, not sure what more to suggest.

 

The only issue I had with Win7 (that I recall) was the touch screen not responding and also messing with mouse clicking when waking up. I figured Win 8 would solve that and do a better job dealing with scaling between high and low DPI displays. Yes, Win8 is better when dealing with DPI differences but not perfect. The touchscreen issue was not solved by going to Win8 but was solved by the display bios update. I don't know if that would have fixed the problem in Win7 as well.

My coworker's issues were similar and he had a hanging issue. I again suspect some driver wasn't updated. Since he wasn't worried about Win 8 and mine works just fine with Win 8 that was his solution. So I can't say if the thing would have worked well in 7 if he gave it a chance.