Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

Man, I disabled modular, eSata and manually unplugged the dvd.. I'm jealous.

I was on vista 32bit 64bit and windows 7 64bit, same with all of them.
Never tried XP. I dont mind XP, I just dont want to be forced to use an old OS with a brand spanking new machine, you know?

I also though that I might not mind, but i let it go while playing music and i suddenly heard a small "tick" and i checed the latency in the background and sure enough, red spike. So it's not good enough.

I mean, right now im writing this on an old HP NX7400 and I haven't had a single red since i turned it on like 4 hours ago, and just to stress, i installed 23 updates with windows update, while playing mp3s over w-lan. Random yellow bars, not many but 95% greens. I dont think its unreasonable to expect the same from a top of the line precision

Oh well..

Edit: and I even have an old Vostro 1500 thats been going strong with no reds for the last 2 hours aswell. It's just been idle, with no use, but still.

 

True, this issue shouldn't exist in the first place. The cause of this is somewhere amidst all the hardware and drivers in the system and that's also why it also exists in the Latitude line, almost the same system.
No surprise really that your old HP has no latency issue, there could just as well be no other system with the same issue...at least not because of the same reason.

Maybe it'll be fixed it updates, maybe we'll never find out

If you can live without the hardware you'll have to disable i'd say just sail it out and see if it's fixed in updates.
If not, call Dell to get it replaced or send it back completely and get a refund.
I really hope for a simple fix though

 

I would like to give it a go too. Could you please post a link to the older drivers? I think the Dell download page only has the most recent drivers.
I am specifically looking for version 8.4. This way I can post my results as well.

 

I got mine from this page:

http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Product_Filter.aspx?ProductID=2101

Just select your OS, and on the next page go all the way to the bottom and select previously released. There you should find a few. Btw, does Intels website really suck or is it just me? Talk about making people have a hard time finding stuff on there.

 

Regarding updating the driver...

I just downloaded the whole application from the Dell Site (there is the driver and the application) and it installed both (there is a Matrix Storage Manager Application - about 18 mb).
If you just want to update the driver that you downloaded, go to Control Panel->System->Device Manager, then find the driver under storage controllers (Intel(R)ICH8M...), then click on update driver and point it to the directory with those files and it should update it.

HTH

 

Hello people. Ordered a refurb today. Should be getting it later this week. Thanks for the info you have all collected. I shall scour these posts to become learned about my new best friend.

Specs:
T9600
4 GB 1 DIMM
160 GB 7200RPM
8X DVD +/- RW
512MB 770M
1510 802.11a/g/n
WUXGA 1920x1200 RGB-LED with TrueLife
370 Bluetooth Module
Web Camera and Digital Microphone
FIPS Fingerprint Reader

Quite better than my XPS M140 (aka Inspiron 640m)

 

I installed the 'application' from the dell site, but the drivers with no installer ... I just unzipped them ... maybe I should try that.

However the access time is within spec for what is quoted by other benchmarkers online, so I don't think I'm going to get improvement. It's about 16ms vs 14ms for my old i8600. And when I'm doing certain things (compiling large number of small java source files) the percentage difference in speed there is exactly how much slower the m4400 is compared to the i8600 (5-10%).

As soon as the files get big though the m4400 kicks the i8600's butt all over the place, so it's not a complete loss. Just sucks to wait 4 years, pay more and get something worse :-(

 

I've been reading this thread, but I can't find the answer. Is this actually a glossy screen, or is TrueLife a common mistake in the description?

 

TrueLife is Dell's trade name for "glossy". The RGB-LED WUXGA is a glossy screen, the 2CCFL WUXGA is a matte screen.

 

Is it just me, or is the DVD-RW drive for everyone this flimsy? Both my original system and the replacement are so weak that the drive scrapes if I tilt the machine while it's reading a disc, and the tray pops off its rails when putting discs in. Is this a common problem, or have I just gotten unlucky?