Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

does anyone use ik8fangui on their 6400?
Or is it incompatible like the m1730?

 

Got silver "scratch & dent" m6400 for the wife last week from the outlet (matte RGB LED, 8GB, 3700, camera, bluetooth, dual 320 7200 drives, etc.). Can't find a single scratch, dent or bad pixel on it. Really great buy at the price.

Updated all the software and BIOS from the Dell site and then loaded Photoshop CS4 64bit (for memory access and speed) and 32bit (for all her non-64bit plugins). Did a screen calibration with our Gretag Macbeth i1 Pro spectrometer. Screen takes a little getting used to when placed next to her big Eizo or NEC, but the photos can now be moved between calibrated systems with little or no visible change.

No problems at all with the speed of boot, shutdown or how fast photoshop is running, so I have no plans to do a clean install of Vista Ultimate. I can't give you any specific performance specs since no gaming is done on this machine and no extraneous software will be loaded on it.

This is our first Dell in over 10 years, and we are very happy with it so far.

 

I had 2 M6400 with the LG RGB-LED which always had a red spot in the left down corner... now I've got a Samsung RGB-LED-screen... it has no red spot but the viewing angles are worse...

I've some infos that Dell doesn't use the LG RGB display anymore... strange... I liked the LG screen (even with the red spot) more than the Samsung screen..

 

18kgui I think is the best program for Dell laptops as it was designed only for Dells and as usual it's working fine on my 32bit XP 6400. I had an m6300 which it also ran fine on. Since it hasn't been updated since the M90 I'm impressed that it reads all four core temps and the fan control works exactly as you set it. In this customers eyes why Dell doesn't buy 18k and include it as part of their software says somethng about Dell. The guy who wrote the program and kept updating it did so with no support from anyone except donations. And he's not been updating it because he has better things to do. Comparing it to a lot of other temp. control programs I think the GPU might be reading ten degrees farenheit low, or maybe not. All other temps from memory to the chipset to the drive are spot on with SIW, which I think is just reading directly from the sensors and posting the results when asked. Using SIW to directly read the sensors, hard drive heartbeat, speed fan and others I judge it to be head and shoulders above the rest. Speed fan in particular I don't trust with this machine or the 6300 before it. I sure took a long time to say it but I love 18k but one poster I suggested it to said it didn't work on his 64bit Vista m6400. But with my personal experience with Vista 32bit it surprises me that anything works with the 64bit version. That's just my opinion, as I actually meet people who are willing to go to the mat for that bloated beast. I forgot what you're running but I'd appreciate an update if you try 18k.

 

I have the LG screen, without any spots and wondered the same thing myself. Two months into it and I'm still amazed at the color and the bright bright brightness that I like. And if you make the text big enough you can damn near read it looking across the screen from about 5% off from an edge view that blocks everything as you're looking at the side of the display. I did read that early on LG was the only company that had it but don't know it for a fact. The window whacked toucan is a perfect color test if you're familiar with toucans. And as they regularly crash into my windows and sit around for a bit recovering every color is spot on. If you see what looks like green washing out from around the beak to the hair stuff around the eyes, that's not color bleeding, that's exactly correct. And on my screen at least every color is precisely correct. I'd like to find a calibrator to borrow just to see how it reads that picture or any of the others I have because the only color adjustments I've ever made were with that Nvidia setup thing and using it as instructed it just screwed up the colors.

 

Buy, beg or borrow a good hardware calibration device and software. It is an investment, since screens should really be recalibrated at least monthly, more often as they age.

I don't know if it is the specific unit we have, but the original colors were no where near what we now have after calibration. Although they looked reasonable when we received it, the calibrated screen is sharper, blues are darker and everything has lost the slightly washed out look. Without calibration, my wife (the photographer) said it was useless for Photoshop. BTW, we have the Samsung screen.

The main reason we purchased this laptop was the wide gamut matte screen. It took a while to find a loaded matte version at the outlet with the Q9300.

 

I put this up in the thread about these drives, but thought some folks here might be interested.

The non-GForce version of these drives is listed as 135 in stock for $132.99 at:

http://www.thenerds.net/SEAGATE.Seag...5832-2&affid=3

 

I use a spyder 3 elite colorimeter. With the LG screen it worked flawless, but with the Samsung calibration is too red... I will try to adjust the calibration... and you're absolutly right, the screen looks so much better after calibration, with the RGB-LED-screen the calibration improves more than on all other displays I used yet.

Here are the asked pics of the new slim power adapter together with the old one:

 

I have the Huey Pro, it seems also too red after calibration (but otherwise much improved); I need to figure something out I guess...