Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

You should turn splendid mode off... the colors will be more accurate.

 

I just replaced my 500GB Seagate Hybrid HDD with a 480GB Intel Model 530 Solid State drive, and I wanted to share a lesson that I learned in the process.
Previous to this operation, I had Secure boot disabled because I'm always making regular image backups with my Acronis True Image Home software, which requires me to boot of a USB thumb drive. This presented no problems whatsoever, and the laptop was still able to boot to the hard drive as usual.
After cloning the drive and installing the new Intel solid state drive, the laptop would not boot, and gave the error "reboot and select proper boot device". After much frustration and research, I discovered a little option hiding on the F12 screen that allows you to change the boot mode from Legacy to UEFI, and as soon as I switched it back to UEFI, it booted up just fine. The same option is on the F2 screen, but I had previously tried setting it there but it did not fix my problem. I also have no idea why it was booting up just fine for 3 weeks since I received the machine and immediately changed to Legacy boot, but that's how I fixed the issue. I will, of course, need to switch it back to Legacy the very next time I need to make my next clone backup, so I may have to keep switching it back to UEFI each time after competing my backups. Ugh!

 

I believe you can generate a key for your Acronic USB bootloader and add it to the whitelist for secure boot. I am not sure specifically how to do that, but it would eliminate the need to keep switching back and forth

 

I'm a little confused on exactly what configuration you were running when because you seem to be using UEFI and Secure Boot interchangeably, and they're not the same thing. Secure Boot requires that you be running UEFI, but you can run UEFI without Secure Boot enabled. If you originally installed Windows while in UEFI mode and booted the installation media in UEFI mode, then the image you captured will be for UEFI and thus when you restore it, you'll likely need to be in UEFI mode to boot it again. It's possible Acronis is smart enough to dynamically change an image during restore based on your current BIOS mode setting, but I'm not sure.

In any case, if the Acronis imaging environment actually boots in UEFI (but with Secure Boot disabled), why not just leave it in that mode all the time, or keep Secure Boot enabled most of the time and only disable that when needed rather than switching back to full Legacy mode each time? UEFI should boot a bit faster than Legacy anyway (especially if you can boot with Legacy Option ROMs disabled, more details below), which is why I'm curious about why you promptly switched to Legacy when you got the system in the first place. But given that you did, if you did that BEFORE installing the OS, then switching to UEFI later would mean that it would still be booting that particular OS in legacy mode, meaning you can't enable Secure Boot or disable Legacy Option ROMs, since Legacy Option ROMs is what's allowing your system to be in UEFI mode and yet continue to boot to a legacy-mode targets. If you switched to Legacy AFTER installing the OS (i.e. it was in UEFI mode while installing), then it sounds like you didn't boot the installation media in UEFI mode and thus didn't install the OS in UEFI mode -- otherwise your OS wouldn't have been bootable after switching from UEFI to Legacy. In this case again that would mean that you couldn't disable Legacy Option ROMs, since your OS would have installed in legacy mode regardless of the BIOS setting.

It would also help to know which OS you're running. Windows 8 can run in UEFI mode with Secure Boot enabled and Legacy Option ROMs disabled (optimum configuration, but requires that it was installed in UEFI mode in the first place), whereas Windows 7 requires that Secure Boot be disabled and that Legacy Option ROMs be enabled since it still requires legacy-style access to certain hardware, including the GPU.

 

You can't generate a key. You need to import a certificate (containing a key) as trusted, which has to come from Acronis because then the Acronis bootloader has to be signed using the private key that matches the public key on the certificate you imported, allowing the BIOS to verify bootloader integrity. If you were making your OWN bootloader, you could generate a key since you'd be signing the bootloader as well, but not if you're using someone else's bootloader. Of course the Microsoft certificates are preloaded on new systems because that's a Windows 8 certification requirement now, which is why you don't have to worry about it there.

 

How do I do that? I dont see any option for that in the display settings.

 

UEFI - marginally faster boot times.
UEFI + Legacy disabled - marginally faster still.
Secure boot - offers some limited protection against some viruses and other malware

You don't have to reinstall Windows, but Windows won't reconfigure itself; it's a manual process, and not a very easy one. If nothing else, make sure to back up first. If you're happy with the current installation, I would not bother changing it.

I'm extraordinarily pleased with the overall quality of the QHD+ screen. I'm mostly pleased with the resolution/scaling, although I suspect it will be towards the end of this machine's lifecycle (for me, I'm hoping to get 2 years out of it; I realize some folks that's very short, but my last couple machines have been in the 1 to 1 1/2 year range) before all of my day to day apps actually handle scaling right

I haven't run down the 61Whr fully, but it drops pretty fast in a meeting if I'm actively on it; I've gotten it down to about 40% after a just-over-2-hours bore-a-thon at work. I'm guessing around 4 hours of regular use. I tend to keep my screen pretty bright, and while compared to heavy professional 3D apps the combination of too many messaging apps and IntelliJ aren't that heavy, it's still not a "just browsing" workload.

If you keep the original 500GB Hybrid HDD, it's still fragile like a regular spinning disk, and a good deal slower. OTOH, if you need tons of space you can swap in a larger hard drive (although it's limited to 7mm high at least with the bracket provided, so the biggest ones won't fit), and you can also swap in a 2nd SSD. The combination of a relatively fast mSATA card and a relatively (by SSD standards) slow big drive (Crucial M500 960gb) has been a winner for me.

Get a start menu replacement. Start8 is $5, ClassicShell is free, both are good. ModernMix is interesting, although I've yet to find any real use for any of the metro apps.

It's in mobility center, not display settings. No idea why Dell did that.

 

Thanks for the info, as I was indeed under the assumption that the Secure boot and UEFI were the two available options for a single setting.
I'm running Windows 8.1 that I installed from the USB media that came with my laptop.

 

Wow, it is really getting way to complicated to manage booting to other devices. Long gone are the days of being able to easily install dual-boot Ubuntu Linix or a bootleg OS-X image.

 

So now that I've successfully replaced the hard drive with an SSD, and added another 8GB RAM module, I was interested in running WEI to take a fresh look at what the performance numbers look like. When I run "winsat formal" from the command prompt and then examine the formal assessment XML file that is generated, I notice that my graphics score is only 5.9. I can only assume that the assessment is using the default Intel HD Graphics 4600 chipset, and the NVIDIA Quadro K1100M is not kicking on for the assessment. Does anyone know how I can turn the NVIDIA chipset on for this assessment? In their efforts to make everything so "automatic", they have hidden the configuration window I'm used to seeing that lets you control which programs will utilize the NVIDIA graphics chipset.