New M6500 Discussion Thread

Moogle, I've a bad feeling I won't get the Hard Disk bracket and since I am heading to Victoria, Canada for a 5-year study course right after receiving the M6500 in 5 days (since our units are from Malaysia), I've a feeling that I'm going to have trouble ordering it immediately too. *sigh* I wonder how efficient Dell's international service tag transfer is.

Yup, will definitely buy the RAM from a third party vendor in Asia since it is much cheaper here.

 

Aikimox (you won't happen to be taking up Aikido, would you?), I've got to agree with you on the glossy screens - didn't like the one on my M15x but I could live with it since I use the computer in dark places most of the time. >_< I really wonder why people like them at all though. My favorite screen was from the Dell Inspiron 9400 and it was matte WUXGA. Still use it to watch movies as the glossy screen even reflects the light of my room's bulb and I'm not too keen to spoil my eyes by watching in total darkness too often. Maybe you can try the Raytech screen film or just buy the non-covet M6500.

 

Yep. I got the 90W battery with my M6500.

 

Yep, I'm into Aikido.

Tried filters/films - waste of time and money.
Yes the non-covet M6500 is one of the few laptops that I'd like to have...

 

Thanks for the tip!
+1

 

I haven't fully read this entire thread (time consuming ) so I am not sure if this has been answered: does the m6500 have a large whitelist of discrete graphic cards that can be installed (I think I remember hearing that somewhere)? Also, barring any shipping delays due to part shortages, are these shipping ahead of schedule?

 

I'm still seeing a few "flaky" things that I thought I would post so that others could watch out for them as well.

I have the ambient light sensor turned off in bios and in the Control Point software (which I disabled through msconfig). This morning when I was editing images on the display and reached up to tilt the screen, the screen colors changed drastically. At first I thought there was potentially a loose connection or something that was causing the change. Then I noticed that the colors shifted whenever my hand was near the ambient light sensor. I verified that the ambient light sensor is disabled in bios and Control Point. Still, when I move the display so that the ambient light sensor is under different light sources, I can provoke a shift in colors. Not brightness, COLOR with a distinct shift toward green when the ambient light sensor is in sunlight.

NOT GOOD! I want consistent color, not color that changes on a whim from the ambient light sensors.

I don't have a good fix for this (yet) but would appreciate it if other users would test their display (with the ambient light sensor turned off) and see if they observe the same anomaly.

Thanks!

Keith

 

Keith,
Until you have a better solution stick something over the sensor.
M

 

Hmmm,

I think I have some silver metallic duct tape that is a good match for the "carbide" color of the case.

Why didn't I think of that? (Or maybe black electrical tape will work better.)

These software anomalies always bother me until I can get to the bottom of them. I always wonder what else the system is doing to skew the calibration without my knowledge.

The ambient sensor is definitely turned "off," because that setting prevents the software from adjusting the brightness, but it still adjusts the colors, sometimes significantly.

I can't seem to find a device manager setting that would allow me to completely disable the light sensor.

I also recall an obscure reference in the HP dreamcolor literature that implied that the light sensor for that system was used to adjust the white point of the display, I presume based on the temperature of ambient light. Since the M6500 uses the same "dreamcolor" display, I wonder if this system has that functionality built in, without any mention in the Dell literature? At any rate, it IS changing the display colors without my wanting it too.

Thanks for the suggestion.

Keith

 

Have you contacted Dell technical support? Could this be the reason why bokeh and others couldn't success in calibrating the screen correctly?