I'm planning to buy a Precision M4400 this week, anything I should know?

oh yea, one more issue...i switched to my samsung drive from the first m4400 i got, because its very quiet compared to the seagate.

however it does have an issue, the free fall sensor randomly activates, you can hear a click as the drive head parks itself urgently..

i hope thers a firmware update for the drive soon. at least it happens very rarely and i can leave my notebook on while i sleep, where else the seagate just makes too much noise

 

@wearetheborg

At first i had some issues using the pcmcia card in vista (for an external soundcard) and when a tech guy came buy to check it out he somehow stripped the screw hole on the chassis...this and the pcmcia issue meant both the chassis and the mobo had to be replaced. The tech guy just told Dell he wasn't going to do it and they had to send me a replacement...they did

Yeah i think officially AS5 would void your warranty but i wonder how that would work. If i do need a replacement or fix where this might come up i'll play stupid and tell them i'd never even dream of doing something like that etc. I know there are m4400's out there that came with paste on it iso pads so let them prove this wasn't the case with mine. And even then...i've applied it and it hasn't done any damaga.

@afhstingray

You're right there...it shouldn't be necessary to do all this troubleshooting! I'm just glad i got it all sorted now and i have a full system backup tucked away whcih is extremely clean and where all is working as it should. Took a bit of work but somehow it feels nice loading it and having a completly frsh lappy again (think i'll do that bi-monthly or something, along with the vent cleaning and stuff)

 

Hm, that list of complaints kind of spooks me. Are there similar problems with the Latitude E6500?

 

Having just a couple of sample point smay be misleading. I believe most of the people are happy with the m4400, perhaps peruse the M4400 owners thread ?

For instance, you can ignore th HDD issues, thats a problem with the HDD firmware and not of the laptop.

 

one issue i realised recently, which i thought i was imagining is the screen suddenly turns off, for a split second, literally just blinks. i thought maybe i was imagining it, until i was with a friend and he pointed it out too.

i think someone recently posted on the forum that dell told him they were unable to offer the 2ccfl screen with vista 64. i suggested that maybe this might be the reason.

im gonna try reformatting next month, if these issues continue im gonna really bug dell about it.

i think if you look in the owners lounge, you'll see that many many people have had a lot of the issues i mentioned, most notably the freezing, audio issues, fingerprint reader, GPU downclocking and CPU limiting issues.

 

Have you tried running linux ?

 

why would i want to run linux? all my stuff is windows based. i see no point in running linux even to troubleshoot, as i will definitely not be using it as my day to day OS.

 

To figure out if the problem is in the software or hardware.

 

if its the hardware i've been extremely unlucky to have similar problems with THREE different units.

im gonna give it one more shot before giving up and either selling it or writing an angry letter to dell to try and get something sorted

 

I did not have any of these problems.

Sometimes I do have heat problems, sometimes I don't.

I have a Western Digital drive and no fingerprint reader.