Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

If you buy from an established seller and the item photo is not stock photo and matches the item it should be fine and you will save the sales tax.

 

I've purchase a couple of the following from Amazon and so far (a couple of months) they work great:

Amazon.com: VicTsing Ac Power Cord Charger Laptop Adapter Tip Connector Converter for Hp Pavilion, Envy, Elitebook, Dell Latitude, Inspiron, XPS, Precision to Asus, Vivobook, Toshiba Satellite, Lenovo Ideapad Laptop Charger Dongle: Computers & Access

 

The same seller is selling that for $6.89 at Rakuten:

HTML:

http://www.rakuten.com/prod/power-charger-cable-converter-adapter-for-dell-vostro-5460-v5460-hp/263997280.html?sku=263997280

I also went with a $19 (+$7 shipping) DELL PA 4E 130W adapter off Ebay. Dozens of reviews on this particular item were positive so fingers crossed that this time is different...

All in $33.88 for a 2nd 130W adapter. Will post all links after testing it next week.

Bonus: No Glowing Power cord. If it works will keep this one at home.

 

What is the run time with the 91W Battery?

Thank you

 

If you men the larger battery option, ~5 hours without switchable graphics when new, 8-10 hours with switchable graphics.

 

Yes, the larger battery; Thanks.

How do you use "switchable graphics"?

 

Anyone know if there is some trick to get the touchpad to register a right-click using the Function (Fn) Key + Click? Sorta like COMMAND+CLICK on a Mac?
Two finger click doesn't work for me half the time (it is infuriating!) and keyboard shortcut F10 workaround doesn't always work when what you want to right-click is under the mouse (in IE, for instance, it brings up the right-click menu for the whole page not the hyperlink you're pointing at).

Man, FN+CLICK would be sooo ideal.

 

Fn is a special key on the keyboard in that the OS isn't aware of it being pressed. The keyboard itself detects it and alters the scan code of whatever other key you press in order to send what appears to be a single (different) key to the OS -- all that to say I don't think Fn+Click is an option. However, you can just enable the option to treat the right-hand side of the touchpad as right-click. You have to click pretty far over toward the right edge for it to register properly (well past the dividing line printed onto the touchpad itself), but otherwise it works exactly like touchpads with physical buttons, no need for multiple fingers or modifier keys.

 

He means the NVIDIA GPU as opposed to the Intel GPU. The term switchable graphics came about when you could toggle between one GPU or the other, which originally requiring some combination of a reboot, BIOS change, or (on Macs) a logoff. On this and other more recent systems, the system automatically detects when applications that might require additional GPU horsepower are started and enables the NVIDIA GPU to provide it. You can alternatively override those decisions by right-clicking an application shortcut and choosing the "Run on graphics processor" option to specify which GPU you want, but on this system there's no way to completely disable either GPU.

 

I tried that. But there are issues with that too. Like there being no physical texture to know when I'm far enough into the right-side area to do it (unless I go aaaalll the way until I feel the edge). I tried placing a bit of square film (cell phone screen protector) in the area but it was ugly, only marginally useful, and I like the idea of having that real estate to move around freely in and having the film there was jarring.

No, the best solution is to have a FN+Click to perform a right-click like Macs do or just giving up and using an external mouse. I'm not sure why QuickSet wouldn't be able to easily achieve this if Dell had the foresight to implement it since it hooks into other FN functions. Unfortunately, only Apple has the foresight to do these small-but-useful little things.

The clickpad on the M3800/XPS15 is better than many other PC clickpads (notably the horrendous Lenovo clickpad I tried before this laptop), but it is light years away from the quality of MacBook clickpads unfortunately.