Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

sorry I mean fifth light, mine never turns on.

Please put yout AC adapter near your self when you work with your computer. Do you hear a "tik tik" noise from the brick?

 

the fifth light is for WWAN (celluar internet). if you dont have the card installed it will never light up.

i was so tempted to buy the card because i often do use mobile broadband but i've always used HSDPA via bluetooth instead. its really so easy to set up vista with my windows mobile phone

 

I held the ac adaptor up to my ear and do not hear a tic tic tic. What I do hear is a very light hummm. Maybe you should try plugging it somewhere else (no, not another room, another location entirely). Maybe you have something in your house like a dimmer switch or something dirtying the line.

 

heh, mine is running A11 from the start and has this "feature". I'm not really concerned about noise but I don't like it running all the time because it's probably sucking some small amount of power and it'll up the chances of a failure down the track. Hardly big issues, but I would rather solve them than not.

Can anyone tell me how to get hold of the older bios versions? I checked out the Dell support page but it is only listing the current version (A11) and I can't see any way to get old ones.

Cheers,

Simon.

 

I have zero fan noise, nor heat....Simon...where are you? I'm trying to figure out why these machines are so different. BTW, my Western Digital HD is quiet, and my Samsung Monitor is clear

 

here's all the BIOS's you'll ever need....try A02 or A03
http://ftp1.us.dell.com/bios/

 

Im fine with A03 or A09.
Actually im on A09 because i maybe have some better things i dont know about "under the hood"

 

The "brick" is used to describe the M6400's power supply. The M4400's adapter isn't a brick

Here a pic of the "real" brick vs. a Latitude power suppy (unfortunately not the 130W adapter of the M4400, but you can see why it's called "The Brick")

 

Broadcom USH - I don't have a fingerprint reader on my lappy, is there any reason why I need to install it? It appears that I would have to install the ControlPoint Security Manager but I really don't want to screw up a good thing.

Comments/suggestions?

 

I ran into the same thing after doing a fresh install of XP sp3. I had everything working perfectly and was worried about messing it up. The driver for the Broadcom USH is contained in Dell_ControlPoint-Security-M_A07_R206690.exe. It's not the Control Point application, it's actually a collection of drivers and security updates. When you install it, you have the option of a custom install and you could uncheck everything but the Broadcom USH driver. I ended up installing all of the security updates and my laptop is still working perfectly (i.e. no latency spikes, audio is still perfect).