M6600 Owners Thread

Just to let you know that Dell has sent a service guy to repaste my CPU after I reported my temps to them (60C on idle, 90+ under stress and throttling). The operation has been a success - I'm now cooler by almost 20C!!!



PS If they do it under warranty in Poland, I don't see why they wouldn't worldwide!

 

I always called high temps a trade-off or downside to overclocking. Part of what keeps everything in check since overclocking too much means shortened card life and decreased stability. Of course on the M6600 "too much" seems to have a lot of room to work with.

 

There's always a trade-off. I usually find my max stable then back off a bit for everyday use. Of course, I don't game everyday so this equates to 2-4 times a week. I'm hoping I can replace the M8900 in a year or so if the new cards are compatible. If not then so be it, I'll keep an eye out for an 6990m.

Oh, temps don't usually get quite so high when gaming.

 

You can clone the partition with SystemRescueCd -> There's a tool in the bootable CD called GParted. Keep a backup of the factory image. Very useful for a fresh install.

 

You meant they changed the CPU heat-sink to a brand new one? Coz in my case, the factory applied thermal paste is on the heat-sink, protected by protective plastic film. Remove it and it's ready for use.

They did that to my old m6500 covet which solved the overheating problem caused by an earlier service.

 

Also check out for accumulation of dust many months down the road. That can cause overheating for old laptops.

 

Yes, they changed the entire heatsink. In my case, the factory paste was squashed out and away from the CPU surface...

The guy didn't use the original paste that the heatsink comes with; he removed it and applied his own.

 

Is anyone else getting spotty performance out of the M6600 touchpad when trying to use the one finger scroll feature? To clarify, the touchpad itself works just fine, it's just the one finger "inertial" scroll feature that is very spotty. I even changed the size of the scroll zone to wide, and things are still very much hit-or-miss.

Anyone else having this issue, or is everyone just using the middle mouse button for scrolling?

 

Spotty as in jumpy, not smooth scrolling. Acceptable to me here with Firefox 10 and IE 9.0.8.

I find the ALPS touchpad is much better than the Synaptics that came with m6500 covet with the special light up touchpad. The same OEM app bundled with DELL kept failing when I use pinch zoom in Firefox (all versions). It's very clear DELL never tests their software. It's so easy to reproduce the error. With the Dell Synaptics Driver, my touchpad will not work until I reboot after I used the pinch zoom in Firefox. This is what I call completely unacceptable. I fixed it myself by removing the original synaptics software from Dell and replaced it with the Synaptics original and everything works except the touch pad won't light up and some features missing (which is acceptable).

Come on Dell, if you have people reading this, do something about your software.

Or Dell just decided to do a few more hours of testing on this m6600 3rd generation precision that makes it able to survive Firefox and IE usage. For my case at least.

The jumpy issue, don't think will be fixed or patched. It's a built in issue with Windows 7 and below. Wait for Windows 8 to have Mac/Apple like smooth scrolling with pleasant inertia experience.

 

Compared to the standard, honestly M6600 touchpad is horrible. It is not so responsive everytime. Its like multi touch capability never works the way you want all the time.

IMH, touch pad should be as good as the ones in MBP, if not better.. They are just assuming that we will dock it and never use the pad for any editting.