Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

It has been a whopping 5 days, and I thought I would share my thougths thus far.

Got the machine mid week, and immediately upgraded from 2GB (2x1GB) Ram to 8 GB Ram (4x2GB) as it was cheaper for me to order the extra ram separately than to have it configured with.

Then booting into the system, everything works wonderfully well. The RGB-LED is truly amazing. It nearly blinded me the first time it came up and I was in a fairly dark room. Even the dimmest setting is rather bright.

I configured various settings, including various system settings, making the system mine. The fingerprint reader is a bit questionable at times, but I managed to get it working just the way I like. It occasionally will fail to load up correctly, thus not working at all.

The only issue I had initially was that of the Blu-Ray drive. The drive would not eject at all. I tried triggering from Windows, tried the paper clip release, the button, nothing. Finally, I decided to take the drive out, and managed to force it loose. Since then, it works perfectly! Too much glue is my guess.

As for the battery, I am very impressed. I get well over 2 hours in power saver mode, and that is not enabling the Dell extended life mode which disables hardware.

The machine is slightly wider than my previous XPS M1710, but is thinner, and a bit lighter. I must also state that it is much more stylish than the m1710.

Only troubles thus far are an occasional audio stutter, and the keyboard with the numeric keypad makes the trackpad off-set from center. The keyboard is rather stable, and the back light is awesome. Only complaint is the calc, mute, and volume keys are not back-lit.

The docking station works rather well. The system handles docking and un-docking fairly well. I have only had minor problems with undocking, but nothing serious.

I chose the covet for the stylistic reasons, but the M6400 line was the goal here. I needed the extra RAM for various reasons, and the system provides the most. Truly wonderful.

 

Yeah that was my first impression "holy crap this thing is bright".
One thing which I hate is that I was hoping to work on the laptop in the dark, as the backlit keyboard makes it possible. But the lowest brightness level is still too much.

I've mitigated it somewhat by using a blackish theme in linux, and making all backgrounds black, and foregrounds lighter. But working on other apps which have their own color scheme will not be possible in complete darkness.

 

Please could you specify the P/N for the Multibay adapter (inside the M6400) to install the 3rd HD and the external Multibay for install the CD-ROM externally, thanks

 

Please could you tell us the P/N for the Blue-Ray drive ?, I want to replace my DVD-ROM with the Blue-Ray drive, thanks

 

Hi All - I too have the wonderful RGB-LED display, I take it all the owners commenting on the still bright lowest setting have pulled the brightness down in the Nvidia control panel?
Mine defaulted to 50% brightness, making it 0% has quite a difference!

It does enhance dark colours and shadows however but it's easy to change back for daylight use if you need to.

Cheers

 

I tried it, but changing the brightness level messes with the colors. I have set it to 30% which I thought gave it the best color reproduction.

 

Anyway, I was able to figure out connecting Display Port to HDMI adapter to a digital projector.

I do have another question. I am running Windows 7 x64 Beta Build 7000. I just got the E/Port Plus dock. For some reason, when docked, the M6400 has no sound. Does anyone have any idea why that may be the case? My M6400 dual boots to Vista 64 and has no problems with sound when docked. I am using the same IDT driver for both Vista 64 and Windows 7 x64.

 

I got my M6400 with just one hard drive. If I want to add another HDD, do I need to get an HDD assembly like in the studio 17 ?

 

Man all these people getting M6400's... hopefully someone will take mine and give it a nice home.

 

No you don't need anything but the hard disk.