New M6500 Discussion Thread

Hi all,​

This may help explain what the 100MB partition is


And how to avoid its creation in the first-place, in a Windows 7, clean installation

What’s that mysterious 100-MB Partition?​

If you install Windows 7 on a clean disk with no existing partitions, it creates a System Reserved Partition of 100MB at the beginning of the disk and uses the remainder of the unallocated space to create your system drive. That small Partition isn’t assigned a drive litter, so you won’t even know it exists unless you look in the Disk Management console or use Diskpart or a similar low-level utility to inspect the disk structure.

This stub of a Partition, new in Windows 7, serves two functions. First it holds the Boot Manager code and the Boot Configuration Database. And second, it reserves space for the startup files required by the BitLocker Drive Encryption feature. If you ever decide to encrypt your system drive using BitLocker, you won’t have to repartition your system drive.

If you’re confident you’ll never use BitLocker and prefer to do without the additional complexity of this 100MB System Reserved Partition, your best bet is to make sure it’s Never Created. For a truly clean installation starting from an unformatted hard drive, you must use an alternative disk-management utility, such as the setup disk available from many hard-drive manufacturers or a startup disk from Windows Vista. Create a single primary partition using all unallocated space, and then point the installer to the newly created partition as the setup location.

Note: that you cannot use the graphical disk-management tools available from the Windows 7 DVD to perform this task. After you use the third-party tool to create a partition on the drive, you can point the Windows 7 installer to that location it will work.

I hope this helps

 

Out of curiosity, how loud are the fans on the beast at different levels of power consumption/activity? Those vents are pretty enormous, and obviously it's necessary considering the hardware. I'm pretty attentive as far as keeping things clean and removing dust on a regular basis... just wondering if this machine would turn out like the XPS1210 I have which sounds like it's about to lift off and any moment while doing practically nothing but idling.

 

That script caused my machine to freeze up on shut down and when it rebooted it would crash the event log service and stop aero from loading.
(Win7 Pro 64bit.)

The best I could get with it was 438 seconds

I used a stop watch and out of the dock my best time was also 48 seconds exactly.

I am not impressed with Windows7 startup/shutdown speed.

I have a mini-itx setup with a 1Ghz Via processor, and a 30GB OCZ Agility drive that on XP that restarts in 18 seconds.

 

In idle when the fans come on its about as loud as rubbing your hands together gently. Probably 20db. at 1.5 feet away.

 

Sorry for that. Me too the first boot was problematic with 3557 seconds!

But now is working. Same for me: XP seems faster.

 

Does this include the BIOS POST time? Because my "old" M6400 restarts in less than that (about 35 seconds or so, hand-stopped... ) from a set of 500GB RAID0 hard drives, but that's without the BIOS test. And this machine is loaded with software. What's your startup time from end of BIOS test to appearance of the welcome screen?

 

It is from time it logs shutdown to event viewer to time when desktop is loaded.
It looks at system clock so it includes the bios in the total time.

 

My M6500 arrived on Tuesday - should get it from the IT guys today. Weird question, aside from the laptop itself, the dock, bag and options I specified explicitly in the order, what exact bits and bobs will come with it - i.e. disks, manuals, leads, adapters, cards etc. It's not that I don't trust the IT guys not to lose all the bits, it's just that I errr... don't trust the IT guys not to lose all the bits.

 

It comes with the power adapter and 2-3 discs for OS, drivers, etc. The pamphlets or inserts that came with it were pretty much useless. I think Dell only ships hard copies of the manuals when you explicitly order them.

 

Hello,

I own a Precision m6500.

I want to ask something.
I forgot in some place the power adapter (I will get it back soon). Someone at my workplace could get me dell power adapter which has the following (I know it is not the one for a m6500, but rather for a m70):

Input AC: 100-240V ~1.5A
Output DC: 19.5V / 4.62A

Which means it is a 90W supply device, although the m6500 requires a 210-250W one. I would like to know if it is "safe" to use it, just for the day, and also if it can do some "job" as for the power supply. Therefore, I do not intend to use the machine on a high level (dim light,, no 3D apps, no high use of processor - let say, no flash - and so on).

Thank you for you help!