Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

It's like rolling the dice...

The guy that just received his 2nd M6400 had to have the LCD replaced. That happened this morning and now he has some "wobbly" effects that actually go away when he changes the color depth to 16 bit. He is not happy.

My covet is still A-OK... I will not install a bios upgrade until I really need to. If I was starting from scratch, I would.

 

I was waitting for some price drop before getting my M6400 (buying from dell.fr - France). I was expecting a move after Xmas, but I just visited dell.fr and the M6400 is even more expencive now.... great ! (could it be an error, as covet base is same price as normal base ? ...crossing my fingers).

But anyway the RGB LED display option isn't yet available with non covet M6400 in France, so I can wait few more time.

As I'm reading this thread and others, it looks like the M6400 has a lot of problems. Are most fixed actually (switching to new Bios, downgrading to XP 32bits...) ?
Could owners list their unsolved problems or hardware issues ?

I was expecting a lot of that machine (my dreamed laptop !) when I heard early last year it was coming out. But I feel embarassed now and even started to look at the HP 8730w as an alternative (Lenovo w700 is way too expencive here).
I wan't a powerfull laptop that don't crash, I can't spend time to fix problems and need the baby to run perfect on 24/7 dutty.

 

"I was expecting a lot of that machine (my dreamed laptop !) when I heard early last year it was coming out. But I feel embarassed now and even started to look at the HP 8730w as an alternative"

I was in the same boat. Got scared hearing about all the dell problems and went with the Hp 8730w. Should be here in a few days

check out the Hp 8730w thread vs this one, this Dell thread has 164 pages of problems, issues, people sending them back, etc. The hp one has 20.

That's the main reason I went with the Hp. I shouldn't have to reinstall OS's, get drivers in the right order, etc, in order for a $5000+ flagship laptop to work! My hats off to those who have stuck with the Dell by the way and now have a good solid laptop.

Regards,
Simon

 

FWIW - I've not had any problems with my M6400 at all...and it runs all day, every day.

 

I though you just were unpleased with the WXGA+ screen?

On this board there are a lot more Dell users, than HP users. --> There are a lot more M6400 Users (164 pages vs. 24 pages) and the M6400 thread startet about 2 Month earlier. Only a few percentence of the M6400 users having problems. Most satisfied users don't post.... so making a decision on the number of pages of two threads sound very weird and naive.

After all, the biggest point is, if you want more than 8GB or two hdds in raid and an optical drive, you don't have a choice. Btw. the USB ports on the 8730w would drive me crazy. And you only get a matte dreamcolor screen. On the M6400 you have the choice between matte and E2E, which gives you a even better contrast and a clearer view

Here you see the typical matte diffusion on dark colors:

 

Thanks, you give me hope My replacement should land this week, I am crossing my fingers.

 

But it isn't 164 pages of problems...it is 164 pages of discussions some of which are about problems.

 

I love my laptop in fact I ditched my external monitor as the LED screen is much better then my crappy TN 24 inch LCD was.

 

I'm happy with my refurb M6400 so far. I plan on upping the memory (came with 4GB, going to up to 8) and probably buy a bluetooth card for it. I am not using the Dell pre-installed OS however (came with 32 bit XP installed). I have installed Vista Ultimate 64 and Win Server 2008 in dual boot.

Only real issue I am having with it is some driver problems under Server 2008. Keep getting hardware failed messages for the WLAN card, even after I disabled the card and uninstalled the drivers. Not really sure what that is about, but the card works fine under Vista. Will continue to play around with it.

I even moved my WWAN (Verizon 5720) card over from my i1720. Only issue I had with that is that the Inspiron used clips to hold the card and the M6400 needed a screw (used one of the 2 screws that hold the bottom cover). I am a little worried about getting the bluetooth card as that will also need a screw to hold it in place.

 

I'm very happy with my M6400. I haven't had an ounce of problems, I also did a fresh install and didn't install any of the Dell bloatware.