Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

Hello all,

Just placed an order for my M4400 this week and am now nervously waiting and hoping I don't have any of the issues that are discussed at such length here (though with this great forum, I reckon just about anything can be sorted out!).

I was really tempted to spring for the SSD but Dell's prices seem outrageous and they also don't give any details of the spec of the SSD that would ship, so I figured I would wait a bit and purchase something aftermarket later on as a 2nd drive. (I don't really care about boot speed, but want it for my huge software projects which are always disk bound when compiling or loading the IDEs etc.).

A few questions if anyone can help with:

• Anyone else installed a 3rd party SSD? How did it go? What did you get?
• Am I limited to 1.8in or are 2.5in ones possible too?
• Is it going to go in the DVD slot or can I have both DVD and the SSD at the same time?
• Do I need to purchase a special caddy of some kind or would it mount straight in?
• Does anybody else use an SSD for software work? Did it help a lot? I think it should, but actually I've not found anyone who has actually done comparisons.

Thanks for any advice!

Simon.

 

AFAIK

1) you need a 1.8 inch one
2) you need to buy the modular bay caddy thingy

 

I believe you can replace the internal 2.5 drive with an ssd. They should fit in the same slot.

I think the 1.8 drive would be the secondary one which has to go where the dvd player is located. The secondary drive HAS to be 1.8 and it HAS to use the same bay as the dvd drive.

I believe SSD's are gonna be the norm in a few years. We will look at standard hard drives the way we look at floppies now. However, they are just not worth the price\size ratio right now. Too much money for too little difference.

That's probably why you don't see too many people comment on them right now.
Everyone wants one, everyone want one that is at least 1 Terabyte, and everyone wants it for about 300 bucks.

 

he wanted to use the SSD as a second hard drive.

i think finding a caddy for the modular bay is going to be difficult....its probably better to get a modular second hard drive from dell, and use that in the dvd bay, and buy a 2.5" ssd to use internally

 

Listen to afhstingray!

 

Yah, i'll see what i can get them to do. Very disappointing nonetheless.

zuper, the reason the Dell SSD is priced so high is because they use one of the very best units on the market now, the Samsung sata-2 SLC SSD. That said, larger drives are only going to get more and more affordable, so unless you need the extra speed now, it makes sense to wait. Just make sure you do you research with purchasing a SSD drive, the difference in performance between models fluctuates as much as their prices.

 

Yes I hope it will make a little difference,no biggie if it doesn't though,was only $10.

Well,I'm not really even a fan of 16:10 either except for movies and game's use,for my cad work 4:3 is a lot better for me as I can have tool palettes on the top where I prefer them and not have soo much wasted space on the side's/not enough vertically.
I won't even try a 16:9 because I already know I won't like it.....I like change,but it has to be change for the better.....16:9 isn't imho.

Lol at Apple.....it amazes me Steve jobs doesn't sell iSteve doll's of himself....touting them as revolutionary and amazing in every way.

Oh no,what a bummer.....I wouldn't be impressed either,hopefully they will pull out all the stop's to make it up to you.

Hi Simon.
In the module bay you are limited to a 1.8" drive platter or SSD
You have to remove the optical drive to use the secondary hard drive module.
There were some listed on ebay a while ago [120gb platter] for around USD 100.00,so presumably you could get one from there [or somewhere similar]and swap it out for a SSD of your choosing and would probably work out a lot cheaper than dell's extortionate price's.

Personally I've given up hope for someone producing a 2.5" enclosure for the optical drive bay,so have ordered an external eSATA enclosure and will see how that goes.

 

Hey, thanks everyone (Weegie, minibob, chupacabras, afhstingray) for all the great advice!

Shame to hear that - I was hoping it would be simple to just buy a caddy, but it sounds like one way or another I'm going to end up with a spare drive on ebay

Yeah, that's pretty much what I figured. It was very frustrating on the phone - the Dell reps (I tried asking two of them) would not tell me what kind of SSD would be included or give me any baseline performance numbers. I guess it just kind of pissed me off that they would expect me to pay > $1000 for a drive without *any* idea what was going to be in there or how it was going to perform other than "really good". For that kind of money I want to do a lot of research and really know what I'm getting. And like you say ... I think in even 6 months everything on the market now will look like worthless junk. SSDs are doubling performance every few months at the moment. So better to wait.

Cheers!

Simon.

 

Hi, I need your advice. Before Christmas I told Dell that my M4400 had a dead pixel and they proposed me to replace the laptop. I've just received the replacement laptop yesterday, checked it but sadly it comes with the LG WXGA+ screen. It seems considerably grainy and blurry to me. My old 4400 with a Samsung LCD ,despite it had a dead pixel looked much sharper. I'm very frustrated .

 

Just got my M4400 (I can vouch for speaking to a sale person - I got an upgrade to the FX 1700M for nothing...) but I seem to be having a bit of problem with video playback.

I've tried various codec packs and plain old DivX but almost all the videos I've tried look absolutely dreadful with lots of motion artifacts and ghosting.

I've tried updating the driver for the graphics card to the latest version (7.15.11.8520) with no luck.

Has anyone else encountered this?

Harry