Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

What's better for a high-end laptop like M3800: "sleep" or "shutdown"?

Edit: M3800 with a SSD.

 

Edit: posted from my phone before it loaded other posts with the same information. Mods delete please.

 

It doesn't matter, and a laptop being high-end doesn't really change the equation. It's not great for spinning hard drives to be constantly powered up and down (which is why I tend not to like that particular power saving feature), but that would happen in both sleep and shut down. But I've run several high-end laptops powered on 24/7 for years, which has got to create more wear than either of the modes you're talking about, and I never had a problem with any of them, so I can't imagine either would be an issue.

 

Thoroughly fed up with Windows 8.1.... backed everything up to save my setup, and installed Windows 7. FWIW, the standard Windows 7 Ultimate SP1 installer disk from my prior system worked fine, so it does have SLC 2.1 in the BIOS.

Will see how I like this with Windows 7.

 

Totally agree










Sent from my RM-846_eu_euro1_267 using Tapatalk

 

I tried running Windows on a MBP 15, and yes it was gorgeous and lightning fast. However, I eventually sold it on eBay because as a programmer, the Apple keyboard layout of the Mac was very cumbersome and drove me nuts. No Insert key, Control key only on left side, no delete key (delete key by default works as a backspace key). I was happy when my external keyboard and mouse were connected, but productivity literally crawled to a halt when I had to go somewhere and use the laptop by itself. No thanks!

 

I've been wanting\waiting to buy this machine since it was announced. It's driving me crazy that I still really want it but I'm afraid to buy it with all the hardware and 3rd party software issues people seem to be having. It's hard to tell if people are being too picky or if the issues are really show stoppers...of course that is different for each person which is part of the problem. But the ratio of complaining to praise about this machine seems higher than on your typical forum about a piece of hardware.

 

Well I think part of that is that this thread is a lot longer than most forum threads, so there's been more opportunity for complaint. As for the complaints themselves, it's important to differentiate between the nitpicks (i.e. people complaining about things that keep their laptop from being perfect even though perfection isn't a reasonable expectation), issues with specific units (which will happen especially early on with brand new components as QC ramps up), issues inherent in the design (e.g. coil whine, trackpad discoloration), and issues caused by the software side not having caught up (scaling issues that may or may not affect you based on what apps you use). I personally love my machine, but I'm not affected by most of the HiDPI scaling issues and I accept the coil whine as normal since I've experienced it on many of the other high-end laptops I've used over the years.

 

Interesting. Just in case you don't like Win7, care to elaborate on what you hated about 8.1 so maybe we can help out? I tried 8.0 twice and both times I wiped it in less time than it took me to get it installed, but I actually liked 8.1. Reading this article also helped me feel more comfortable with it: Getting around your PC - Microsoft Windows. Once I realized that the Start screen was essentially the Pinned Start Menu items from Win7 and All Apps was just a Start menu, that plus knowing how to get around rather than feeling stuck/lost in the Metro UI helped me not mind it so much. And since then I've found a few things I really like about Win8 over Win7.

But there are also things I don't like, such as Network and Sharing Center having a lot of functionality removed (harder to change between public and private network modes, no "Configure wireless networks button"), Power Options settings in odd places, Folder Explorer options in odd places, etc, but there were things about Win7 I didn't like compared to WinXP early on as well.

 

I'm also thrilled with my M3800. The USB disconnect/reconnect issue appears to have been resolved. My ace in the hole with this machine is that I had a previous experience buying a laptop with a much too high resolution, and experienced the sting of not being able to read the Windows 7 Desktop fonts and DPI scaling issues. I knew going in that I was going to stick with the standard 1080p screen, and couldn't be happier with this laptop.