Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Yes, exactly. The middle-tier configuration is a 2.5" 500gb hybrid hard drive AND a mSATA 256gb drive. With the lowest-end, you can add your own mSATA drive.

Depending on configuration, you can have either (2.5" only in the lowest config, msata only in the highest two, or both.) With Premier (or if you get a good sales agent on the phone) it's either or both, configure to order.

Couple of potential reasons; the most mainstream one would be to get the bigger battery and without configure-to-order, you have to get it to get the 512gb SSD.
The other reason would be to minimize weight with the mSATA and the smaller battery.

Also, the pricing from Dell on Premier is the same for the mSATA or the 2.5" drive. I realize that's not typical of the open market, although in the case of the Crucial m500, the premium for mSATA can be quite small on smaller-size drives.

Yep.

Or do what I did and have two SSDs, one fast (256gb Hynix from Dell) and one slower (by SSD standards) but big (960gb Crucial m500, out of my older system).

I've had it get weird on me a few times recently in the opposite way; get unresponsive. Oddly, usually touching the screen "wakes it up," although there have a been a few other instances where I had to reboot.

 

No, I assumed it shipped with the newest drivers. I tried restarting, but it's been having issues all day today, too. I assume the latest drivers should be gotten from the Dell website below?

Drivers & Downloads | Dell US

 

Hi guys,

Yessss.... finally I just got my new top tier unit... and it looks just beautiful.
Before I do anything on it, I want to install the 8.1 OS system on it supplied in the USB.

I need help from anyone to give me some general guide lines on how to do this.
Do I have to do a clean install on the system to wipe windows 7 out or is it just an upgrade which will be done by the machine automatically.

I have never done OS changes on my machines before, just general upgrades, so I want to make sure that I start correctly and do not wipe out anything out or run into problems in the process. I do not mind keeping the Dell software that come with the machine since from what I have read here they are not too many of them anyhow.

So really the simplest solution would fit I guess and I am really hoping to hear from anyone on the simplest way to proceed to get running and install my software and transfer my files.
Also, please advise as well on the important Drivers that I should install after...

Many thanks for the help. As soon as I have impressions of the unit I will make a post.

 

The cleanest way is to switch to UEFI mode in your BIOS and enable Secure Boot (which will render Win7 unusable), boot off the USB installer choosing the UEFI boot mode option, choose clean install, delete all existing partitions, and proceed. That WILL wipe out everything, including your factory restore partition, but that might not work anyway after wiping out everything else, and if you don't want to use Win7 then it's useless to you anyway.

An in-place upgrade from 7 to 8.1 might be possible, but it's messier and you wouldn't get UEFI mode in that scenario. But if that's what you want, skip the BIOS change I mentioned above and start the USB installer from inside Win7.

As for drivers, install everything you find on the Dell Support page, EXCEPT:

- Rapid Start (it's not really worth it on the top-spec system IMHO -- but you DO need Rapid STORAGE)
- FHD Panel firmware update (you have QHD+)
- The Lite-On firmware updates
- The Driver CAB file

Some drivers may be worth going to the vendor site rather than Dell (NVIDIA GPU, Wifi, Bluetooth, etc), but if you've never done this before, keeping it simple isn't a bad idea.

 

Thanks for your quick reply and assistance JP.
I will keep you posted on how it goes...
Too bad I cannot do this tonight since I have other things to do unfortunately but I hope to be able to get to this tomorrow....

 

After a bunch of messing with different VM environments (Hyper-V, VirtualBox, VMware Workstation), I've found the VirtualBox has the best support for scaling windows. Leaving "2D acceleration" off, it works really well, even with 3D acceleration on -- although so far I can only get it into 4:3 resolutions. 1152x864 scales up really nicely, and it seems to be an ideal way of handling stuff like management consoles that won't scale. In a pinch, might even install Photoshop in there.

Not sure it will work for games, though.

 

craigo81 0n page 140 mentions to change screen color mode from splendid to generic but when I open Windows Mobility Center there is no option for that. The colors are ghastly and I can't find my Spider 3 calibration puck at the moment. Can someone advise on the color mode please. I've got the 3200x1800, big battery and 512 GB option primarily for Photoshop.

 

Make sure Dell QuickSet is installed, and make sure you boot the machine with no external display attached. Don't even bother trying to calibrate with splendid mode enabled, you still won't even get close to accurate.

 

Well, I went ahead and ordered an mSATA SSD! I can't wait to get it, since it makes such a huge difference..

Question: I want to install Windows 7 on the SSD when I get it and reformat the current HDD so that I can use it for storage. A USB drive with Windows 8 came with the computer, but there isn't one for Windows 7. What should I do?

Another question: When I reformat the HDD, can I get rid of the Dell recovery partition and that weird blank partition, or should I leave them alone? Here's what the partitions look like right now:



Thanks!

 

You'll need to source a Windows 7 ISO from somewhere, but I'd strongly consider sticking to 8.1 on this particular machine, in which case you can and should switch to UEFO mode and enable Secure Boot. For Win7 you can switch to UEFI if you want (though the benefit is less on that OS) as long as you keep Legacy Option ROMs enabled. In that case though, you'll need to take extra steps to make a UEFI-compatible Win7 USB boot drive (http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/15458-uefi-bootable-usb-flash-drive-create-windows.html) AND make sure to boot that device in UEFI mode rather than Legacy.

You can clean the existing disk using the clean command in diskpart. A regular format would only format the main partition.