Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

I am having serious issues with waking up my m3800 from sleep off of battery power. Often, when I close the lid after the laptop has been on battery power for just under an hour, it won't wake up when I open it. The keyboard lights up but the screen will not turn on. The only option I have to regain control of the computer is to hold the power button down and hard shut-down the computer. This obviously results in a loss of whatever I'm working on at the time. Anyone have any suggestions?

 

I did a fresh install of Windows 7 on my new SSD and everything is working great after installing the Dell drivers and Windows updates, but I have a problem. There isn't a W7 product key anywhere on the laptop or in the documentation (that I saw), so before doing the fresh install I used a program to find the W7 key on the computer. I used the correct Windows ISO (W7 Professional x64) when installing, but when I try to enter the product key Windows says "A problem occurred when Windows tried to activate."

Any suggestions?

 

You can just call Microsoft and activate over the phone.

P.S.: Going the disk imaging route would have avoided all of this...

 

I am awaiting my M3800. Which I ordered in January, and now has a ship date of March.

Which, without reading through this thread, which part is causing the delay, just for curiosity?

I was balanced between the XPS 15 and the Precision, and went for the precision for the graphics card, and for Win 7 natively installed. I have the high end one ordered, and am hoping I'll like/adjust to the higher resolution.

Here's my question ... a good share of my work involves using ppt and needing to connect to projectors that will not match the Precision DPI. Has anyone connected to a projector with a ppt at 1920X1080 or 1280X1024?

thanks! Erin C-H

 

The computer will detect the native resolution of the projector and output that. You won't be able to output anything higher. You may notice that things look quite large on the projector if you are using scaling.


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

 

Try disabling Intel Rapid Start if you've got it enabled.

The QHD+ panel, but things seem to be getting back on track now, though there's still an order backlog Dell has to work through. And the above poster is correct about the projector issue. Your best-quality results will be achieved by adjusting scaling when you attach to a projector (which requires logging off and on). Otherwise you can keep automatic per-display scaling enabled if you'll be running Win8.1, but that means things will look perfect on your built-in panel but possibly blurry on the projector. Whether you notice depends on what sort of content is in your presentations.

 

COIL WHINE...
SO...my M3800 has been perfect, apart from the static type noise others on this forum have reported which I have also been experiencing.

Just to clarify, I get the noise when the laptop is plugged in and at 100% charge. The noise then happens whenever the machine is under load; opening applications, browser tabs etc.

Today we had an engineer visit to look into the issue. He was very helpful and tried several things including new charger brick/cable, new power-motherboard connector and various BIOS setting changes. All these things did not fix the issue. We also noticed that when in BIOS mode the noise became a permanent whine rather than intermittent and that it too disappeared when the cable was unplugged.

After a discussion with Dell on the phone the engineer is therefore returning with a new motherboard tomorrow as this seems the only thing left to try. I am hoping it will resolve the issue, but I have to say I am not confident the motherboard will be the solution.

 

Pro review of the M3800 is out. Dell Precision M3800 Review | Laptop Reviews

I run noscript on my browser and had to allow scripting to see the benchmarks on the page. The M3800 did pretty well.

 

Wow, that's what I would call mind-numbingly slow for an SSD! Sheesh, my old M6400 boots faster than this, and my 18-months-old Samsung Ultrabook boots Win7 in less than ten seconds. What's going on here?

 

I recently had my motherboard replaced because of a flaky display connector. Prior to that I think I might've heard this coil whine in a very quiet room, but the new board is dead silent aside from the fan.