New M6500 Discussion Thread

careful! This might upset some Nikon shooters there
I have the 85/f1.2 as well, what a glass! it's the reason why I think only M6500 deserves to work with the photo it produces.

 

When installing that NEC USB3.0 driver, a link is available (within device manager) ... http://www.necel.com/usb/en/index.html

So is USB 3 support already implemented (is the above chip already in it) -and just requires a software/firmware to switch it on? -or will it be a minipcie solution?

 

Wow, it seems Dell is really having production problems with the M6500 and its accessories. Although my order has an approved expedite request, it has been delayed 4 times so far.

 

I may be wrong but i dont think you can pass though the usb controller thats already wired to one to a different one on the pciexpress bus.

Our only hope is the usb controller chip was built with the usb3 spec in mind and provide a firmware update, frankly esata is all I need.

If they have been foresighted on this matter then I have high hopes for the pci-express ssd card, it would be horrific if it was limited to sata2 speeds when in a couple of years 1200meg/s drives will be common. I dont care if i cant boot for the express card, I barely even care about size I just want a stupidly fast diskio for certain files.

 

My initial thoughts of my new M6500 Covet.

First, This machine is sick!! By far and away the most impressive, ultra fast, ultra cool, ultra expensive, piece of computer hardware I ever owned. But first I must bash Dell and you can skip this part if you wish.

-------------
</RANT ON>

Dell... if you are reading this listen to me. I am a lawyer and own a law firm of 10 lawyers and we have grown steadily for the past 15 years. I have always used Dell servers, desktops and laptops. Probably 5 product cycles deep now for hardware replacement. I have easily spent $200,000 with you during the past 15 years.

I bring this up because the buying experience continues to deteriorate in my opinion as time goes on, and this purchase was the icing on the cake. My flavor of this M6500 is, to say the least, loaded. 12 gigs of memory, 2 encrypted SSD drives, you name it. With tax and delivery, it's $6K, and that is with my discount. This is the most expensive laptop I ever purchased and I intend to hold onto this machine for 5 years. I don't care about the 3 consecutive 1 week delays. I don't care that when I call, nobody cares who I am or what I spent with your company in the past, that I can't get any realistic eta, etc. So what. I will tell you what I do care about.

When my machine arrived by overnight, I unpacked it, opened it, and the very first thing I see is a ton of fingerprints smudged all over otherwise beautiful display surface. Are you kidding me? I then turn it on and having just bought 5 computers for my employees (optiplexes & Latitudes), I expect to find the Win7 start up screen so I can enter a computer name and set my time zone, etc. But what do I see? I see the black screen that says "Windows did not start properly due to an unexpected error and needs to shut down" That is the FIRST thing I see. Are you kidding me again? Sure, it started back up ok and gave me the expected welcome screens for a new PC, but where the hell is the quality control guys?

The extra icing on the cake to complete the trifecta was the fact that my wifi card would not acquire a signal. No WIFI. ? So I exercise self help without calling you Dell because I know from the past that service calls are an annoyance to you, and I find this website and discussion thread. Dell, you can thank Bokeh for posting some pictures of the machine with the memory / accessory cover removed and it showed me where the WIFI card was located. I removed the cover and ALL THREE antenna leads for the WIFI card are not connected and crammed into a small unused space next to the WIFI card. Fantastic. I hooked them up. You are welcome. I now have WIFI.

Dell, I am not impressed. I order a $6,000 machine fully loaded, it arrives three weeks late, it has fingerprints all over the screen, windows was not pre-installed properly for the new customer, and the hardware is defective because nobody QC'd the finished product. And the saddest part? I am about to rave about your product anyway because I am past this annoyance. But you should be ashamed or at least take notice that I am holding you out in a negative light to everyone on the internet looking to buy this machine that reads this thread. This is the only discussion thread out there. This is what people will read when they google a discussion of the M6500. Apparently, someone on this thread works at Dell. So if you really work at Dell, PM me for my e-mail and customer number and have a manager call me and tell me why I should keep Dell on my vendor list.

/RANT OVER>

So, after the "delivery experience", I am up and running. This i7 machine is insanely fast. I don't know if its the i7 or the memory or the SSD drives but this is the fastest machine I ever owned. You click Internet explorer and its open on your screen before your finger is off the mouse button (almost - lol ). I am running 64 bit.

For now, because I am tired of ranting above, here are the pros and cons:

PROS: Ultra fast, RGBLED display is absolutely gorgeous, powerful workhorse, love the full number pad next to the keyboard, love the slot load DVD drive, there is much more but only been playing for 12 hours. The instant on thing for e-mail is kinda cool I guess.

CONS: Heavy. And the power brick is heavy and I have the slim one! Dell quality control a MAJOR con, battery life - but admittedly I have not at all started playing with battery management features. But when I unplugged it for a few minutes it said 1 hour 20 min. Scary. Again, that was with screen at full brightness, etc. Someone on this thread said they got 3 hours maybe with battery management? So I gotta play there. Also, Dell, speaking of quality control, for your color management presets you get an F. My sRGB is WAY too blue. All the presets are out of whack. Why have presets at all? Did anyone at Dell actually check this?

One more thing. I have a problem at work where I use DocsOpen 4.0 for Document Management. This uses a local sql client tool, odma, etc. Got it to work on 32 bit win7 but is a no go on 64 bit. Big problem. So I was going to dual boot with a 32 bit Win7 on the other drive. Not ideal to say the least. But I discovered this Virtual Machine - Win XP Mode thing. I installed it and it is COOL! I mean its REALLY COOL! Its like a second PC within your PC. Even stuff like registry settings are separate. And apparently when you add a program to it, if you click that program from your start menu directly, the program opens on your regular desktop seemless. Not sure if that works yet - or if it will solve my problem either - because I am now off to the office to try setting up DocsOpen within the WinXP mode. I'll let you know.

Thanks for reading this very long post.

Adam

 

Adam -

There are three settings for vitualization in the bios. If you are running in windows xp virtual machine you might want to look into the two adavnced settings.

Also, let me know when you get a color calibration run. I want to know what native gamma your screen is running and how closely you are able to calibrate.

 

Has anyone else had problems connecting an iPhone to the machine?

I've been having issues since the beginning and there appears to be a BIOS problem with the PM55 chipset...any ideas?

Regards,
Pablo

 

The new video drivers from Dell make no difference in the control point presets.

Looks like the Control Point software for Latitude and Precision machines other than the M6500 are at revision A12.

The M6500 is revision A13.

Seeing that all of the other machines share Control Point software A12, it could be that the color preset modes in A13 are meant for another machine or display panel. I would also be curious about how the modes look for those with ATI video cards. Maybe its an Nividia thing?

The Latitude E series is due for a refresh soon, so the Control Point software should be seeing updates one way or the other.

 

Well, the virtual machine software is very cool. Unfortunantly, it will not work for my document management problem. So looks like I will be setting up a dual boot machine. Win7U 64 bit on the primary SSD and Win7U 32 bit on the second SSD. It's ok. In 6 months I will upgrade our server to a new document management solution.

For what its worth, I did have it working up until odma integration between DocsOpen and Word. But it would not integrate. I had installed a second instance of Office in the VM and even joined my domain at work from within the VM and mapped drives too!!! So cool. In the end it would just not make the final step and in all honesty its just easier to dual boot. When at work for typical day to day stuff, ill be 32 bit. When not at work, Ill fly at 64 bit. And we go heavy on video productions at our office for our new website so when I run Premiere and Photoshop Ill boot in 64. Premiere CS5 will ONLY be 64 bit from what I hear.

Adam

ps I have alot to do to setup these 2 drives before I get to color management. Once 32 bit is done and working on drive 2, Ill be wiping the primary and starting over with 64 bit on drive 1. I am anal about clean drives. I have so far put some much crap on and off in 12 hours I want a clean registry and start from scratch..

 

Hi Adam,

Lots of folks, including me, would be interested in what brand, model and firmware revision your SSDs are. Some folks are leary of ordering the SSDs from Dell because they are afraid of what they might get.

Thanks,

Keith