Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

Don't bother installing it if you don't have a fingerprint reader.
Go to device manager and right-click on the USH peripheral and choose disable to not be bothered to install a driver for it on reboot.

BTW, I try to stay away from Dell "Applications". They, more often than not, just mirror something that windows does anyway.
The new Controlpoint Connection manager is HUGE and all it does is the same freaking thing that the Vista or Xp Sp2 connetion managers do... Why install an application that is over 60meg and have it running in the background alongside the windows connection manager is beyond me.

To each his own I guess

 

Thanks minibob. I agree completely - just looking for validation...

 

I have the infamous LG wxga+ wled screen you have read about here. I have no issues with it at all. It looks fine, the text is sharp and the colors are fine.
The dvd burner issue is a Bios issue. I had problems burning with Bios A09 but it worked fine when I reverted to A06. I now have A11 but have yet to burn with it.

Please, if you are gonna get this laptop, get the accidental damage warranty with it. It really is cheap and might save your @ss later on if you do something with it that it was not designed to do (like using it as a frisbee).

 

Are you talking about the Dell Universal Connection Manager in msconfig startup?
What else is duplicated and not needed? For example, windows bluetooth does it for me.

 

I am talking about "DELL_CONTROLPOINT-CONNECTION_A11_R207459" specifically. It's a 373 meg installer. It is definitely not needed.
I don't know how it calls itself in msconfig startup once installed. It does, however, sit in your system tray and pretty much does what the windows connection manager does. It scans for wifi signals, it prompts you for a connection password, tells you when you are connected, etc.....

This application is fairly new. You can find it on the m4400 driver download page. It you have some ram to spare or find you don't have enough processes running in the background, or if you simply feel line having more icons in your system tray, you may want to give this app a try.

I suggest you install the stuff you find under chipset and the various drivers for your system, and only turn to the dell Applications if you find that (put your peripheral here) is not being handled properly by windows.

If your bluetooth hardware is being handled properly within windows, stay with that config.

 

I disabled Dell Unversal Connection manager as it's called in msconfig and I'm still connected lol. What about Control Point that sits in the tray? Does that have to run at startup? Is that what you're talking about?

 

Control point is another thing you don't really need. You can accomplish the same thing as controlpoint by hitting the Fn + (whatever function key you need) to enable and disable various bios functions like battery charging and the like.

 

Please, does any owner have the same problem? When I play games on M4400 on maximum settings, after ca. 10 min. GPU reaches almost 85 degrees of Celius if not more. The fan runs at maximum speed. After this, by frames per second fall down to approximately 20 % of previous performance. The graphic card becomes hot and it lowers clocks. It function of course, but not sufficiently.

Do you have the same experience? did you solve it? will I succeed if I want to replace or repair it?

 

No, mine doesn't do that. It shouldn't throttle down at 85C. I'd get it replaced myself. If most machines DON'T do that, then there's something different about yours that's not right. Maybe nvidia had a run of bad cards...I believe we are using the same stock DELL driver.

 

I'm in Australia ... the M4400 was manufactured in Malaysia. And yes, the fan still hasn't stopped since I got it. I'm going to play around with different versions of the BIOS today and see what happens.

Any hints about installing new BIOS images? Is there any way I can permanently screw up my machine trying to install a new BIOS ? Haven't attempted this before