New M6500 Discussion Thread

Anybody having issues with Roxio with SSD drive? Mine just freezes my system when the Roxio splash screen appear.

 

As my lovely wife would say "just be patient". I realize the wait is agonizing, especially considering the premium price we're paying. If it makes you feel any better, I've been waiting since 3 December.

 

There is a related program to crystaldiskinfo called crystaldiskmark. The crystaldiskmark program can give you a benchmark of your disk read and write speeds. If you run this benchmark on a new drive, you can then run it again later to see if your read/write performance has dropped. If it drops significantly, then trim is not working properly.

The samsung SSDs also have "garbage collection," which is similar to trim and runs in the background when the SSD is idle. If you find (by using crystaldiskmark) that your drive read/write speed is degrading, you can try leaving your machine idle (logged off) for an hour or so and then run crystaldiskmark again. If the performance has recovered, then garbage collection is working properly.

 

Valentine's Day is a very good reason to cancel your order!

 

Interesting that it lists USB 3.0 as an "optional" upgrade. Is it implemented through an add-in card? Or maybe it was a poorly written press release?

 

So true.....

 

touchpad drivers

which touch pad drivers are you using, the ones on dell site or the drivers form synaptic?

 

Dell is not going to have a motherboard revision it would likely require a different chipset just to add USB3.0 that is something they have never done on any machine, on a product lifecycle.

If it does not have a 3.0 controller now it will be an add on card.

Per the article I linked as long as AHCI and TRIM is enabled in the OS then the built in Win7 SATA driver is the only thing you need and a drive that supports TRIM to work.

As said TRIM and garbage collection only works when you leave the machine idle or trigger a delete command.

If you want to try something download a 300MB file or something and do a shift-delete on it and walk away from you pc for an hour or two leaving it on.

Then run the benchmark again. The drive should always be around 90% health if TRIM and Garbage are working right.

 

What a joke! I called this morning my Account Manager to tell him that I wanted to return the computer for latent defects and because it was 2 weeks that I was waiting the Engineer to come (with the Next business day ProSupport!)... He told me that they were still waiting the missing parts and no repair before next week minimum...

BUT I just received a call from a woman from Dell informing me that an engineer will come today!

What a joke! just because I asked the USB 3.0 and the 3MP camera update ;-)

 

If I remember correctly there is a daughter-board on each side above the motherboard. The one on the left has usb, soundcard, and firewire. The one on the right has usb, esata, video, and networking. The system board sits in the middle and (I think) lower in the chassis. Really wish I had taken my camera over to the IT service dept when they removed the screen.

Edit - I found them in the service manual.

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/wsm6500/en/SM/TD_IO_1394_Board.htm