Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Interesting! Thank you for posting concrete evidence. I suppose there might be some hardware-level antialiasing going on in that case. Sadly there's nothing in the Intel Graphics properties that would allow control over that.

Not unless you can get a Dell rep to submit a non-standard order for you. Otherwise, if you want 256GB mSATA, you also get the 500GB hybrid drive and thus the 61WHr battery. If you want the 91WHr battery, you'll have to step up to the 512GB mSATA SSD.

 

Can anyone who's received their M3800 confirm whether the included USB to LAN adapter is USB 2.0 or 3.0? I remember there being some confusion with some order details showing BOTH for a while, but I never saw a concrete answer. The surefire way to tell would be to look into the USB connector itself. If you only see the regular 4 long teeth connectors lying down flat, it's USB 2.0, but if you see that plus 5 sort of raised connectors at the very back of the connector (it helps to shine a flashlight or smartphone flash LED into the connector to see it), it's 3.0. Or if the inside of the connector is blue, that's 3.0, but there are some 3.0 connectors that aren't blue, so that would only be confirmation OF 3.0, not confirmation AGAINST it.

 

It is USB2 only, i have tested it as well, max 30-37mb/sec.

 

I respectfully disagree. There might be a good reason why some modern font designers choose not to round digit "4" even when they round other letters. I am no expert and I don't know what that reason would be, but I have seen other fonts where digit "4" is not rounded, while letters "F" and "E" are. Here are some quick examples from the Internet, I am sure you can find more:

SF Intellivised Font
SF Eccentric Opus Font
Mishmash BRK Font

While, the discussion of a proper way of designing fonts would belong to a different forum, my point is that this could very well be the intent of the font designer, not a mistake. And it really is a matter of taste and a personal preference. This font was introduced by Dell more than a year ago (see the 2012 XPS 15), an I am sure it was professionally designed, not added as an afterthought like you stated. Some reviewers said it looked nice and modern and helped differentiate the new XPS line from the rest of the laptops.

I don't understand why you are making such a big deal out of it. Perhaps your colleagues are just trying to make fun of you and your new expensive toy and you are taking it too seriously?
Even if the shape of the digit "4" and the choice of the font in general is truly important to you and some of your colleagues, I am pretty sure for the absolute majority of the users it would be a total non-issue.

 

Sum up the price of your examples and compare it to the price of one quality font.

I can't believe they're using it so long. I'd say it needs some work. I wonder why they use a normal font on the other precision models.

 

I can't believe we're still talking about the keyboard font. Even though the primary keys are in the same arrangement as every other keyboard, are you still unsure what key does what because that font is that bad for you? No? Then stop obsessing over it! Again, yes the font could probably be better and (obviously) could be better suited to certain people's individual tastes, but it's a freaking FONT! There's no such thing as a perfect laptop. If it's not a dealbreaker for you, then comment on it once and let it be. And if the font IS a dealbreaker for you, well then that's just sad. Learn to type without having to look at the keyboard so you can stop even thinking about pointless stuff like this, not to mention become much more efficient in the process.

 

Hello,

May I ask you in regards to the low-end configuration listed on the DELL UK website for M3800 with normal HD display. It specifies that the hard disk is the following:

500GB Hybrid 2.5inch, 6Gb/s SATA with 8GB Flash Drive [Included in Price]

Are those one hard disk and one SSD with only 8GB storage space, and more importantly - > can I substitute either with an SSD drive? How easy would it be and will I need a SATA or mSATA connector?

In particular, can I install the

Samsung 840 EVO 250GB 2.5 inch Basic SATA Solid State Drive

Thank you.

Ivan

 

The 8GB cache is built into the actual hard drive itself and controlled solely by the hard drive's own firmware; it's not even visible to the rest of the system. If that's the ONLY drive listed (you don't also have the 32GB mSATA cache unit?), then you'd have an empty mSATA slot for an SSD, and you could of course replace that 500GB drive with a 2.5" SSD as well. After that, just check the SATA Mode setting in your BIOS. You'll want AHCI if you're installing a full-capacity mSATA SSD. If you're only installing a cache, you'll want to choose Intel Smart Response. If you're not using mSATA at all, it doesn't really matter what the setting is, though if you set it one way and end up wanting to use the mSATA slot later in the opposite fashion, you'll need to reinstall Windows when you change the setting.

 

It's more that you are getting personal. In fact Dell uses this font on any other precision model because it makes the machine look like

 

Thank you for the quick reply. So I might be better off keeping the original 2.5" SSD 500GB and buying an additional mSATA drive like this one Plextor PX-256M5M 256GB M5M Series mSATA 6GB/s 512MB DDR3 JEDEC MO-300/Ultrabook Internal SSD as it seems to be similarly priced to a Samsung 840 EVO 250GB 2.5 inch Basic SATA Solid State Drive.

Thank you! I am going for it!