Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

On the other hand. If it was the case that your laptop was defective/not working in some way you'd be glad they get you a replacement this fast. And if getting it to you this fast means having 1 item missing like the keyboard, which you can replace yourself when it gets delivered, i'd be pretty happy with it. One of the benefits of business support is that you don't have to send your system in before getting a new one and having to wait without a lappy for weeks for it to arrive.
Maybe you should've told that you were willing to wait for a new one that was exactly the same as your old one without any "upgrades"? I agree a replacement should just be the same in the end but it's not really a major problem i think, is it?

 

Out of curiosity - if you go into BIOS and disable the Esata port (checkbox under Misc. I think somewhere), does it fix the sound? If so, that was the problem I originally had which changed when I installed the Intel Matrix Storage Manager.

 

I'm not sure whether mine is "FFS", but the 320g that shipped in mine is seagate thing -

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.j...f64f9110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&locale=en-US

I'm very disappointed with the drive - it's access time is slower than that of the drive in my i8600 which is 4 years old! And for the work I do, that actually makes the entire laptop slower than the i8600 on some jobs, even though it blows it away on every other benchmark. If I wasn't planning to replace the thing with an SSD in the near future I'd probably be returning the laptop because of that.

 

did you forget to install the intel matrix driver?

or maybe try reinstalling it.

 

interesting, i've a different 320gb hdd installed. 7200u/min that is.
type is WD3200BJKT (at least this is shown in the device manager).
i haven't tested the drive thorough, but so far im fine with it.

cheers, gordon

 

BTW,how to turn preboot password off?really annoying!

 

It's in the bios in the security section.

 

Press F12 repeatedly on bootup and you should get a menu on screen. Choose Bios Settings and once in the Bios go to the security section.
You will find option to turn it off there.

 

Just bought the M4400 - screamer of a machine, but working through issues...

First, I had to upgrade the Driver for the Intel Matrix Storage Manager - had done a reboot and chkdsk started up and started 'fixing' things - on disk structure was trashed. Restored (I had done a complete PC Backup first thing), updated the driver to the 1/8/09 version and life has been better. (Machine shipped on 1/21/09, but of course did not have the latest drivers...).

Two odd things:
1. USB on docking station (one of the hubs) doesn't come up all the time - sometimes it does, sometimes it does not - Device Manager shows "Device Cannot Start". Anyone seen that?

2. I put it into sleep mode last night and came back today and it was going through a sleep wake cycle (computer insomnia). Flashing the screen, trying to go to sleep then waking up again. I had turned off hibernate to fix something else (powercfg -h off), and turned it back on after this (perhaps this will fix it). Was giving a broadcom error (Smart Card Reader 'Broadcom Corp Contacted SmartCard 0' rejected IOCTL GET_STATE: The device has been removed), then a message from ACPI saying the system has been resumed.

Any ideas
TIA

 

Just thought I'd share my experience with M4400. In case someone was interested

I recieved mine on thursday, 5 days ago and was really really impressed with the machine. It was fast, awesome battery and i really liked the LED screen as far as brightness etc goes. But then i decided to see if i had any DPC latency (remember, i read this forum, so I knew what to look out for) and then my interest suddenly dropped..
I had yellow bars atleast once every 10 sec, and red bars at least twice per minute - at least -.

I tried installing windows 7, vista ultimate, vista business, 32bit - 64bit. I disabled the dvd, took it out, disabled wlan, lan, eSata.. you name it! And for the life of me i couldnt get the spikes to stop. Sure, they happened less frequent, but never stopped.

Next to this powerhouse of a machine stands my girlfriends old hp nx7400 and after 3+ hours not a single red spike and maybe 1 or 2 yellows.

So, long story short for those who don't want to read it alll:

I returned my m4400 today due to DPC spikes that would cause my audio & video to drop out for a split second and "crack".

Here's hoping my new Studio XPS 16 wont be to thick!

Shub