Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

In the outside of the cartoon box of the computer, not the accesories.
Mine says "COMPUTER MADE IN MALASYA"

I'm running XP64, no problems at all.

 

This one's normal: You need to enable the TPM in the BIOS. Because of the way the TPM needs to be set up, Dell ships all of their TPM laptops this way. The error message will go away once you have the TPM enabled and activated.

That can happen, but it should not happen more than once.

The Dell Control Point software is complete garbage. It is best to uninstall this POS. Better yet, on an M6400, in my experience, you really need to bite the bullet and format the hard drive(s) and reinstall the operating system from scratch.

See above; reinstall Vista...

That one is Microsoft's fault. You will see this error on every Vista SP1 system. It is harmless, though.

Not good. Given the above hardware issues, I'd say to just send the whole machine back, and get a new one, rather than wasting weeks trying to troubleshoot this baby. You may have a lemon at your hands...

See above; the TPM needs to be enabled.

 

Argh. We need our own forum.

My "new" M6400, the second for this purchase, after two repairs, now spontaneously throws a CTRL in every once in a while while I am typing. Very maddening. I swapped out the keyboard with the dead unit I have next to me and it isnt the keyboard. Bah, another call to Dell. Caveat Emptor!

 

Thx Pirx and everybody.

 

Just got DVD unit and screen replaced.

The new screen shows a noticeable greenish halo near right edge and right bottom corner.
Not a major letdown, but what about QC?

Call me lucky

I cured most of the error entries shown in event viewer by uninstalling DELL DCP crap.
(I'm keeping only DCP "system manager", since without it speakers volume buttons on keyboard don't work.)

I tested again memory for errors. So far no issues.

 

Ahhhhh mine does this too.. and i always end up writing at teh begining or sentences randomly.. have always thought that my palm subtlly presses it by accident...

 

I haven't tried it, but it used to be that if you installed Microsoft's Intellitype software, you could operate the speaker (and other) buttons through that. Might be worth a try.

 

Ok, I found a way to fix this. I kept a log of every time it happened for 7+ hours, and I wrote an autohotkey key logger. Each time it did I killed a task, like my autohotkey scripts, all the way down. Nothing helped.... And then, I turned the touchpad completely off. It has been fine since. I know there is a palmcheck option, and I do have small hands, so I could be hitting the top corner, but why would it press CTRL? I went through the options in case it was the soft buttons or tracking control, and none of them short of disabling it entirely helped. I do use a USB wireless Logitech mouse, I wonder if they are fighting?

 

What is TPM ?

 

"Trusted Platform Module", the security chip inside some of the higher-end laptops, which can take care of the safe storage of encryption keys, passwords, and the like for you.

Unfortunately, not too many people use it, or even know how to use it, with the result that the software support for this feature is awful to non-existing...