New M6500 Discussion Thread

That depends on how you ordered it. Likely not.
If you configured it online then maybe they would honor it but if you called in to negotiate a price they will likely make you cancel and re-order.

 

The hell with that I need this laptop like yesterday and I'm not gonna lose sleep over a few buck since I got a killer discount!

 

Hell, it takes so long to get one of these things, I could order a laptop from HP and try it out for 30days then return it when the m6500 get here!

HP shows estimated delivery dates of April 18th!

 

I just realized Gophn didn't finish his review of the M6500. Is he ok?

 

booting with the 90w adapter give you a warning to let you know the machine will scale back performance and will charge the battery more slowly. It still works fine albeit at a reduced speed. The reduction in speed is no where near as pronounced as it is on the m6300. I used the m6500 with my e6500 slim 90 watt adapter without issues one time in a pinch. Cudos to the engineering team for giving the machine this kind of real world temporary flexability.

 

That's very useful info. When I opened up the box, even having read this whole thread, I thought at least I've ordered the slim one as well, and it's only half the size, it'll be in the other box. Then I opened the other box and it was twice the size! I still can't believe they can make a power supply that big. Yes, it is 10.8A @ 19.5V, so it's going to be big, but my 6 year old inspiron power brick has the same voltage and nearly half the current; but it's less than half the size. Hasn't the technology moved on yet?

Anyway, I never thought to risk trying the little PSU on it until I read it here. Yes the laptop complains about the PSU being inadequate, but despite that it powers the M6500 just fine, and charges - mind you I only have the 720 processor. I'll leave the big power brick at home, the huge one at work with the dock, and travel with the good old 90W PA-1900-02D, and I have a spare of those too, that's worked out quite well.

And OMG OMG. The screen is awesome. Viewing angles aside, at first look it completely outclasses my cherished S-IPS panels. Incredible brightness (far brighter than you need indoors) and the colour saturation is to die for; colour accuracy, well it remains to be seen. I'll be calibrating and profiling it with my Spyder 3 Elite over the the weekend. I have the ATI and Samsung RGBLED, and if that's a combo no-one's profiled yet, I'll post the results.

One last thing, isn't Windows 7 s-l-o-w.

 

Hmm take it your on a normal HDD for the OS? Otherwise Windows 7 runs sweet.

 

I'm on the Dell-supplied 64GB SSD for OS - and a 500GB HDD for data. I do however have a lorryload of snooping, software deployment and other faffware installed by our central IT people, and the overhead of domain membership too. I suppose the comparison should really be with my other 'work' machines, rather than with my home PCs over which I have complete control, in which case it's a marginal improvement, but less than I'd hoped. Compared with my quadcore vista machine at home though (with a similar clock speed) the M6500 boot is seriously sluggish - well over a minute. One day I'll reinstall the whole machine from scratch myself, but for now I can't afford to duplicate the apps that our central IT are licensed to install for me, which would run to several £thousands. I'll live with it, but it takes the gloss off a bit.

 

Hi penguintree,

Invest in an OCZ Vertex 120GB SSD; Read The guru of 3D Review. Newegg has them for $399.00,
dell has them for $569.99 you may need something like rocketfish it’s a hard drive enclosure kit.
And I use Acronis True Image 2010 to clone one drive to another.

The 500GB HDD is fine for data as long as it is 7200RPM.

And how to Stop Losing Display Calibration with Windows 7.

My original Post#1544 for the above Windows 7, link.


I hope this helps

 

Make sure you follow the link Manny provided in order to force Windows 7 to keep your monitor profile loaded. Otherwise Windows will dump your profile (when returning from sleep, logging back on, etc.) and you'll wonder why your colors are so inconsistent.

The s-l-o-w part is the 64GB SSD. The performance on the 64BG is actually worse than some HDs. You need to step up to a 120GB vertex, 128GB Samsung/Corsair or 160GB Intel SSD to get better performance. (Boot times of 48 seconds from pressing the "on" button to all startup programs loaded.)

Dell really should annotate the ordering options on their site so that people understand the performance difference between the 64GB SSD and the 128/256 GB SSDs. People are ordering the 64GB expecting a performance increase over a HD, and that is just not going to happen at that price point with any of the current offerings on the market.