Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge

Part of my sound trouble is I can't get the mic to work! I'm running on XP not Vista so I can rule Vista out. I should add that the skipping is only happening on boot (not important) and when playing Left4Dead (very important! The game can freeze for a few seconds because of it, regardless of screen resolution chosen ) Perhaps I'll have to try a few different games. It is annoying as the game plays perfectly when there is no skipping. A reinstall seems to have lessened the problem slightly but not removed it completely.

 

Got my Covet yesterday as well. Though I pretty much had to wait for the whole day to pass by. Didn't arrive until 5PM. Haven't even had time to turn it on yet. Hopefully, will get to play with it today.

 

Just an update on the sound issue. Dell tech support have told me the manufacturer has built a new driver for the card which is now being tested before being released, so hopefully any stuttering issue will be resolved shortly.

 

Ok, excellent. I haven't had a chance to test.

I spent 3 1/2 hours last night trying to get my wireless connection to get the Internet, and not just "Local Only". Ended up getting on the 802.11g band, but still can not connect to the 802.11n.

By then Colbert was on, so it was time for bed.

 

I had that wireless problem for a bit. After installing new drivers, I dont have it anymore but I still have to re connect every time I reboot.

But that "local only" problem was solved for me by the drivers.

 

sooo, in case anyone was wondering...to add closure to my case, i recieved my machine back from dell a few days ago. they replaced the mother board and didnt fix any of the visual damage from the technician, and i got a bluescreen again the second time i started the machine!! after the bios update(which i had to do myself, figured they would do it at the depot but whatever) there were no more bluescreens at startup but i did receive a random bluescreen while i was working last night. the good thing is i am not having anymore graphics card issues and it works great. I just got off the phone with a really nice dell rep and we arranged a system replacement so i wont have to deal with the lemon i have now. this is maybe the last time i purchase a brand new model before all the kinks are worked out.

on a side note, i have been reading some of the posts about RAID configs, i am wondering if anyone has installed two SSD's in RAID 1 and if this config has a noticeable performance increase over a SSD in non-RAID? would just installing the OS on the SSD and getting a much larger 7200 rpm drive for storage be a better option?

 

I just received my covet, and I'm about to install two SSD's as RAID 0. Installing them as RAID 1 would actually decrease performance as you're basically doing mirroring for data safety, whereas RAID 0 wuld be striping for perfornace.

 

btw...some people were asking about a manual for the m6400, i dont know if this was posted but they have an online manual...

http: //support.dell.com/support/edocs/systems/wsm6400/en/sm/index.htm

 

please post a review of this config if you can...im thinking of doing the same thing. you may have posted this already, but what drives did you buy and why? im kind of new to SSDs so i dont really know what to look for.

 

RAID 1 can sometimes have improved read performance, if the controller has implemented it. It will never have improved write performance of course, since all data has to be written twice. What some controllers do is when you are reading from the disks it treats it like a raid-0 of sorts, striping read requests across the drives. I don't know how widespread that is or if the M6400 has it though.

In any case, yes, with SSDs there would be very little reason to do raid-1. Just thought the tidbit about read performance might be interesting.