Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

Why?..............A04 is out now !

 

What does the A04 bios offer over the A03 ?

 

Seems really subtle ("MRC registers")

 

You have that right. Two months ago I got virtually the same machine, right down to the two 320GB drives and only missing the "Creative Camera" software (whatever that is) but having the three year Complete Care instead and with a 20% Outlet coupon the whole thing, with a 7% sales tax tagged on came to $2480, which if I'm figuring correctly gets the buyer 12GB more memory for two grand! I can poke along just fine with my measly 4GB for a couple of years till 4GB cards will probably be considered sort of small. And priced accordingly. I'm no electronics engineer but I'm not stupid either and I'd like to hear a believable reason for those prices. Recouping development costs? That dog won't hunt. More like "whatever the market will bear" I think.

What kind of boost exactly do you get with 16GB of RAM as opposed to say....4? And is it worth two thousand dollars?

 

You are right. 2K for 12 Gig of RAM is little too much but I use it mainly for specialized scientific simulations and even with 16Gigs it is going to struggle.

 

Too bad they don't have external RAM cases where you could throw in desktop or any other kind of memory cards. But it's like everything else. The 320GB hard drives were close to a $500 extra till they came out with 500GB drives and now, two months later the 320s are down to what....three hundred and something?

And a question. Is there any way to install Vista on my XP M6400 without it taking first place in the boot order? Like maybe install it on my e-sata connected external drive or something? I'd like to have it on a partition some how but not as the primary OS and the one time I installed it I had to jump to the computer while it's booting to de-select it going to Vista.

 

You can do it indirectly. The Vista bootloader will set Vista on first position, but it's not difficult to edit the bootloader settings with "EasyBCD". Takes you 5 min. and you can even change the names of the bootloader entries:

EasyBCD download

 

What is your primary OS?

 

Just plain vanilla 32 bit XP Pro. I do understand the need for more RAM and 64 bit OSs but do wonder occasionally if everybody that has those systems really need it. So I'll just make an educated guess that people wouldn't put out that kind of money just for bragging rights (though some would). But watching the bottom fall out of prices as soon as something a little faster comes along makes me doubt that there isn't some price gouging going on.

 

My status lights(harddisk,power,wifi,bluetooth,...) don't light up.

When i got my M6400 months ago i did a complete reinstall of Vista x64. I like my systems to be ridden of manufacturer preinstalled junk

But after installing most of the drivers my status lights still didn't work. I didn't bother at the time but now i would like to get them working again. They can light up because when running diagnostics they do light up. But not while in Vista.

Is there a certain driver/software i need to install ?