Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

I've not needed to, to date, but if I wanted to do clean install of Vista64 (Ultimate) the only copy I have is on the Dell disk supplied with the machine.

Is this what you guys call a clean install or will it just take it back to a copy of the system as supplied by Dell when new?

Touch wood I've had few issues with this machine and am very impressed so far.

Alan

 

yea, the dvd dell supply you with will just install a factory image again which is what you DON'T want

 

2-2,5 hours (I get about 2 hours surfing with the brightness very low, but I have the FX3700). The RGB-LED (15W) screen drains the battery very fast. The FX2700 (65W) and the Txxx CPU (35W) together with the desktop chipset isn't much powersaving too.

 

Actually the disks you get from Dell are OEM install disks, and will just install the OS. One advantage of using them is that you will not have to enter a "CD Key" or equivalent.

 

I just ordered myslef the E/Port Plus 210W Port Replicator and a Display Port-to-DVI Adapter.

I'm really happy with my new toy!

 

I don't know if its been noted yet, I haven't seen it on the last 5 pages, but the M6400 can now be configured with Blu-ray for the low low price of half a grand. However wait 5 months and that price will prob be around $100.

 

I now have my 3rd M6400.
I had my doubts after machine one and two were problems.
Back in Dec I wondered (and posted) about certain configs being more of a problem. Well there are many variables but I suspect Dell R&D emphasized RAID setups when they tested.

Machine number 3 is a winner. Night & Day vs 1 and 2. This thing is flawless out the box. I did the BIOS update (which is appropriate since I asked Dell to check their diagnostics some time ago - which they said was okay - then new BIOS came out because diagnostics gave false negatives!).

Powered up, BIOS update, all the windows updates, and unlike the other machines smooth as silk. Nothing, nada, all clean and fast. Not a single hiccup.

By the way the previous ones came with LG screens which were the best, for a notebook, I've seen. This one, Samsung, is even brighter and more vivid. The only time I'll be using more than 50% brightness is when I'm outside.

 

I've looked through about 75 out of 174 pages without success, so apologies if this has been addressed somewhere else.

I usually run my M6400 (Win XP SP3, 4 GB RAM, 160 GB RAID 1, Quadro FX 3700M, RGB LED display, A03 BIOS) on a Dell docking port with two Dell 2407 FWP monitors through dual DVI connections. About once or twice a day I get artifacts, either yellow vertical stripes, other color banding, or a black screen with or without a text warning that I have exceeded the display range.

Going to the NVIDIA control panel and resizing the monitor display from native 1920 x 1200 to a lower resolution, then discarding the changes, resets the display properly. However, this is a pain. Since my M6400 was a warranty replacement for an M90 with a defective NVIDIA card, I am somewhat concerned. Any similar observations from this group?

PS, to answer some questions that seem to have come up quite a bit, the power brick weighs 1326.6 g (on my lab scale), I replaced the leading edge of the laptop with razor blades for comfort (or use an external keyboard), and the maximum power draw I measured with a charged battery (running SuperPi, playing a DVD and having a few other background applications, plus four external USB devices) was 103.5 W. So a 220 W power supply, besides tripping circuit breakers on every airline seat I've flown on, is designed for charging a discharged battery while running at 100% usage. Not exactly designed for the traveler...

 

I have the Philips (R879 Liquid Crystal Display, 17WUXGA Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp AG, MULTI-MEDIA Lg Philips Lcd) is this a good one ?, thanks

 

Hey everyone,

I'm a new m6400 user (bought it at the tail end of 2008). I've been having problems with video playback. Videos played in either Media Player, Quicktime or the DVD player are very poor quality with lots of pixely artifacts, particularly in the darker areas of the screen. It looks terrible.
Are there any driver updates I need to download in order to fix this problem? I skim-read the thread and noticed a few other people had this problem, but I couldn't track down an actual solution so far.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

My specs:

Intel Core 2 Quad QX9300 (2.53ghz 12m L2 Cache)
4gb Mem
Nvidia Quadro FX3700
17" WS WUXGA LCD

Running XP 64.

Thanks everyone.