Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

I find this result surprising, as the 512GB SSD will be based on the same controller as the Samsung 840 Pro, and as such is as quick as it gets for SATA SSD drives. FWIW my M3800 gets into Windows 8.1 in maybe 5 - 7 seconds from a cold boot. Not much slower than recovery from sleep in many laptops.

 

Yep, and Windows 7 should be exactly the same; unless someone forgot to install Intel's Rapid Start Drivers, that is.

 

You mean Rapid Storage. Rapid Start does nothing about cold boots. But Win8 will likely boot faster than Win7 because of its Fast Boot feature that basically hibernates the kernel on shutdown (but not restart), but I agree that Win7 boot time is odd and I highly doubt that other owners with identical setups will experience that as the norm.

 

No, I mean Intel Rapid Start, which behind the scenes enables the exact same approach (Fast Boot) in Windows 7 that Windows 8 does natively. Like I said, with Intel Rapid Start drivers (and BIOS support, which all modern chipsets should have), you will see essentially identical boot times of Windows 7 as compared with Windows 8. My Win7 Samsung Series 9 cold-boots in about 7-8 seconds.

 

No it doesn't. If you read the documentation on Rapid Start (such as this), you'll find that it's a special hibernation mode that the system enters into after you put it into regular Sleep (S3) mode, either immediately or after a preset time based on user configuration. It does absolutely nothing with respect to cold boot after you've clicked Shut Down. At that point, when you power back up, Windows 7 will boot normally (with or without Rapid Start installed), and Windows 8+ will use Fast Boot if it's enabled -- again, with or without Rapid Start. Intel probably should have named this technology Rapid Resume based on how it works, but for whatever reason they chose Rapid Start. But it still doesn't affect cold boot.

The Samsung feature you're describing is NOT the same as Intel Rapid Start. I have a Series 9 with that feature myself (though I had to disable it after it interfered with TrueCrypt), but that's a separate technology, I believe called Fast Boot just like the Win8 feature. I don't know whether Samsung retrofitted Microsoft's own Win8 Fast Boot to Win7 with their permission or separately developed their own technology, but either way, that is a SAMSUNG feature and thus is only available on Samsung products, not an Intel feature.

Gotta love today's world of technology where you have "Fast Boot", someone else's "Fast Boot", and "Rapid Start", all made by different vendors for different systems and serving different functions despite the similar names.

 

Hmm, you are right, IRSt only affects the Sleep/Hibernation behavior. This does get confusing; I just checked, and on those Sammies, there's Intel Rapid Start, then there's Samsung's Fast Boot, which messes with startup programs that are started from the Registry startup entries (in a way that's not fully Windows-compatible, and thus unusable...), Samsung's Fast On which has to do with Power Button settings, and finally Samsung Fast Start which simply sets the lid-open action to Resume...

No matter, bottom line, I just clocked my SS9 at 9 seconds cold boot, which would be less than a third the time reported for the M3800 in the review, which is thus completely unacceptable...

Yeah, you got that one right...

 

I think I have the same issue as you. Please let me know if the new motherboard could fix that. Thanks.

 

Just as an FYI, apparently the M3800 does not use a normal Windows 7 product key for activation. I don't know exactly how it works, but after spending hours trying to get a fresh install of Windows 7 to activate and talking repeatedly with both Dell and Microsoft support I've learned that it's just not possible (even if you use a utility to get your Windows 7 product key from the installation that comes with the system, it doesn't work). The only way to do a fresh install of Windows 7 on this laptop is to contact Dell and ask them to send you a special version of Windows 7 that somehow automagically activates when installed on this system (no product key has to be entered, apparently).

Again, I don't know what the issue is and I'm pissed that Dell doesn't include a Windows 7 USB drive or DVD with the system (they did for Windows 8, so why not for Windows 7?), but if you want to do a fresh install of Windows 7 you HAVE to get the special version from Dell, as neither a normal retail or OEM DVD/ISO will work with this computer.

Of course, as a few people pointed out, you can always create a system image of the installation that comes with the computer, but I always prefer to do fresh installs to get rid of bloatware and to get all of the latest drivers installed.

Hopefully that saves someone some time and frustration

 

What issue are you referring to? If you're referring to the system not always waking up with Rapid Start, I just turned it off since Rapid Start doesn't really provide much benefit if you're SSD-only like my setup (it would help in a spinning HDD+cache setup though). I suspect it's probably a Rapid Start and/or driver issue causing that, but so far running the latest versions of everything hasn't solved it.

If you're talking about the QHD+ scaling issue, that's simply how Windows works when dealing with a HiDPI and regular DPI display being used simultaneously. That's not a hardware issue or one that will be solved through any sort of hardware replacement or OS wipe.

 

This doesn't make sense. You say that nether a retail nor an OEM ISO will work? Then what sort of installer would? It has to be one or the other.

And out of curiosity, what ISO version did you use to install Win7? And did you back up your product key before wiping your system to try to reuse it? If so, did it refuse to even INSTALL with that product key, or would it simply not activate? Typically if it's just an activation issue, you can opt for the phone activation method, as long as you have a valid Win7 product key to read off to them and explain what happened, they'll provide you the phone activation code to get things set up. In fact on downgrade-eligible versions of Windows (like 8.1 PRO), you can even give them the key from the higher-level version to confirm your downgrade eligibility. I did that many times on Lenovo systems, and Microsoft's own downgrade procedure process confirms that that's how it works: http://www.microsoft.com/oem/en/licensing/sblicensing/pages/downgrade_rights.aspx.

It sounds like you just got the wrong department. If you haven't already, try calling the actual phone number dedicated to phone activations (shown on the activation page) rather than a generic Microsoft Support number. If you already tried that, try again and hope for a better rep? That's definitely the right way to do this.