Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

Of course. This is what RAID0 does, by definition: Each file is split up over both drives.

 

Don't you think that's a little bit harsh? Your only problem may be a bad power supply.

 

No.

You'll get different opinions on this. In my experience, the disk image that comes with your machine is perfectly fine (it's been like that over maybe a dozen different Dell's I bought over the years), but YMMV... I just note that Dell usually includes a few machine-specific tweaks on their factory-installed image, which you won't get if you re-install the OS. But again, whether that's good or bad will be the subject of heated debate around here

Directions for installation order have been posted somewhere in this thread, I believe. You cannot backup just your drivers anyway, so don't bother trying.

 

Battery light is on ONLY when charging. If you had it plugged in and the battery is fully charged - the battery light is not lit.

 

I don't believe that this is accurate. The CPU is designed to be overclocked - and there is an Intel utility to do it check their website.

From the tests that I've read -- the QX9300 has been overclocked to 3.5Ghz -- and remains stable.

From intel's website on the QX9300

"Support for Intel® Extreme Tuning Utility (Intel® XTU) and Intel® Extreme Memory Profiles (Intel® XMP)4
Intel XTU is an overclocking application for manual performance tuning,
stress testing, and system monitoring. Intel XMP allows you to manually
alter frequency, latency, and voltage parameters.
Intel XTU and Intel XMP simplify processor and memory overclocking to optimize performance for extreme gaming."

 

Can someone tell me what powerscheme options they have? I installed Vista 64, and found some sort of powerscheme drivers on the install disk - Now i only have:
balanced
High performance
Dell recommended
and Power saver.

On XP I had all sorts of options including presentation. Can someone confirm what they see on theirs? I know I can create my own, but was just wondering.

 

The power schemes in XP were a joke. By and large all they did was set the times that your system went to sleep, then to hibernate and what times the hard drive spun down. There were some exceptions to this were OEM's took it upon themselves to tweak how XP worked under the hood. However they were the exception instead of the rule.
Vista's power scheme is 100x more robust. It can scale the processor, bus speed, WIFI card power, screen brightness, etc. Vista defaults with 3 settings
Balanced = Processor can scale base on your usage, brightness of the screen is I think set to about 50%.
High Performance = Processor and everything else is locked at its highest level. No scaling.
Dell Recommended = Somewhere between balanced and High Performance. But like everything in Windows you can tweak it if you like. On my laptop I have a power saver mode that scales the processor in half, drops WIFI to low power state, scales the bus, turns off the hard drive after 5 minutes and changes the screen brightness to its lowest setting.

 

The more I read this thread the more I'm certain that at least 25% of the complaints could be resolved if people would nuke the OS and start from scratch. I've not met an OEM Windows image, be it Dell, gateway, Toshiba, HP, etc, that didn't suck like a black hole.

When it doubt...nuke it from orbit....its the only way to be sure.

Also I want to comment on Dell's diagnostics. Someone was ing that it doesn't always find the problem. This is true. You guys need to understand that the diagnostics that ship with a Dell are designed to seek out very high end problems. Stuff that is so obvious to an diag app that it will find it in minutes. The thing isn't designed to seek out a loose capacitor who's solder has loosened off the system board due to heat, jostling, or just a bad joint. The diagnostics are good....they ain't god like.

 

"I don't believe that this is accurate. The CPU is designed to be overclocked - and there is an Intel utility to do it check their website.

From the tests that I've read -- the QX9300 has been overclocked to 3.5Ghz -- and remains stable.
"

Woah! Someone has to try this out! Although I thought laptop clips were locked down in the BIOS more?

Regards,
Simon

 

yup, but theres no download link for the XTU??