Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

Toward the end of this year,would be my guess.

Why is everybody soo obsessed with ddr3,haven't seen anything said about it that make's it seem worthwhile,apart from slightly lower power consumption.......or am I missing something?

The notebook using ddr3 = XPS M1640?,from jerryj's review,it doesn't exactly impress with battery life [or performance] even with it's ddr3 ram.

What is it with manufacturer's pushing 16" 16:9 screen's anyway?took me long enough to accept 16:10 lol.

 

i cant stand 16" 16:10. its way too narrow. 16:10 is the best compromise IMO..

i read that 16:9 screens are cheaper, thats probably why especially budget notebooks seem to be using it a lot. its cheaper and has the added benefit that manufacturers can say its a "feature" for better multimedia capabilities.

DDR3 would give you about 5 mins extra battery life.....saw someone do the calculations, cant remember where lol...

 

Bah! 16:9; 16:10.... they are both good, they are both bad. Some people like change, some don't. I remember people complaining when the first widescreen laptops came out. "well how I am supposed to surf the internet with my browser window so narrow?"

Stare at your screen long enough and it becomes HUGE, I say. Go ahead and try it....

Your theory about them being cheaper and yet they are being advertised as a bonus feature doesn't surprise me at all.

Apple just announced a 17 inch macbook pro with a battery that cannot be removed by the user and they are selling that weakness as good thing.
"Finally, a laptop where you don't have to worry about the battery"...

Bless all of those marketing people.

 

only apple could do that and get away with it lol....

actually for word documents, 16:10 is a bit annoying sometimes too....but i still prefer it to 4:3...because with my WUXGA display i can view 2 docs side by side...i was one of the early adopters of widescreen. back in the day where it was very difficult to find a case because there were so few around.

i dint mind the 18" acer 16:9 though. that was nice.

im so frustrated at all the software issues even my new m4400 is having. in my 15+ years of experience dealing with notebooks and desktops, i've never had this much trouble getting something to bloody well work.

certainly dint expect this from a top of the line business class notebook after all the good experience i had with dells other notebooks especially the latitudes.

if all the seagate drives are this noisy, the samsung is definitely the one to get....i can barely even hear it when i put my ear to the palmrest.

 

I understand your frustration. Not all seagate drives are that noisy. There must definitely be something defective with your unit.

I did exactly everything you did to get my system up and running. I started with a fresh slate and installed Vista from the dell package and I then installed the drivers one by one which I downloaded using another computer and everything just worked. Heck, I completely disregarded the recommended order for driver installation. I just installed them in the numerical order of the installation files.

Other than that firmware update we discussed earlier I have had none of the issues you indicate.

While I haven't dealt with laptops for as long as you have, I have been troubleshooting my computers since my first Apple II in the 80's.
With your experience and difficulties, I, sadly, believe you may have a faulty system and it may just be easier to get it replaced......again (sigh).

Judging from what I am reading lately, I am beginning to agree with I-RAM. We probably bought a high end machine which has inherent design flaws that we could never overcome since the flaw is in the design.

This model has been around long enough. We can stop blaming bad quality control or even faulty Bios. Apart from some occasional bug, everything should have been sorted out by now.

 

i think it may be a defective hard drive. the noisiness plus lagging playback could be attributed to the hard drive dont you think?

the hard drive also trashes a lot, even when idle. im not sure if its because its a new installation of vista or its the drive itself

im going to transplant my samsung HDD into the new m4400 and test it out. if i dont have any problems (overheating etc) i think i can safely say i got a good unit

 

Glad to hear that!. I didn't know you still had the other drive handy. By all means... Plug it in!!!!!!!!

 

they're only collecting my other m4400 in a week or so.

so i've got 2 units with me now. i dont have a set of screwdrivers though. cant transplant the hdd yet.

im running the diagnostics on the HDD now, its taking forever...

 

They aren't, don't jump to this conclusion yet. I have a 7200.3 Momentus in my current M4400, it's never loud/noisy, but it is audible. The HDDs are the smallest of my issues, it's one of the things Dell actually got right (for me anyway), seems for you they didn't.

Actually, I don't think fixing these little details profits Dell in any way, especially in these times. It's not just Dell with the little hardware issues scattered throughout, every manufacturer has annoyances in all of their systems that they refuse to fix since, to them, if it's not harming performance then they ain't gotta do squat. I don't see it in their plans anytime soon to make customers happy, that's never been their goal.

 

trust me, the samsung in my original m4400 (which im typing this on) is virtually silent compared to the seagate in the replacement unit. i would call the samsung "barely audible" and the seagate "audible enough to be annoying".

the firmware update says it fixes the clicking noise, but it made no difference for me. business notebooks normally are supported for longer, so here's to hoping that the software problems wont just be ignored indefinitely.

the hardware issues if any will be sorted out quietly thru a rev A01 motherboard im betting