Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Honestly I wouldn't put up with all of these issues. At least you've documented everything. Call Dell and escalate until you get a refund. M3800 is too much money not to feel 100% satisfied with your purchase.

 

At this point, that is absolutely what I would like to do, but a few days ago I had the misfortune of dropping the case my M3800 was in and, although it was padded, the corner of the aluminum lid was bent (the aluminum the lid is made out of is incredibly thin. Try flexing it and you may be surprised -- it wouldn't take much to dent it..). It might have been feasible to get them to allow a return after the 21-day return period ended since I've had all these issues, but since the lid is damaged I doubt they'd allow it now.

 

If the issue where the touchscreen stops responding has been covered in this thread would someone please give me an idea what to search for. So far I haven't found it.
Thanks!

 

It's been covered. The permanent fix is to install the touchscreen firmware update on support.dell.com, which also apparently makes the touchpad feel better too. Both behaviors have been confirmed by multiple users. Fyi though thus far there have been 3 reports of the firmware update bricking people's touchscreens entirely, which required a replacement display from Dell, though for many others (myself included) the update went fine.

 

Looking at possibly getting the 256ssd and the 500hd combo, but really want to swap the spinner for another ssd to store large AutoCAD files on for speed of opening them, and they won't fit on the first 256ssd. I am fearful it's above my pay grade to swap out myself. Has anyone used an external ssd? Is it worth it? Is it fast, slow, crap? Just thinking it would save me some trouble and might be nice to have my library on a transferable drive like an external.

 

If you're starting with a 256GB SSD and a combo, the swap would be trivial even if you've never worked on a computer before. Windows will be installed on the bundled SSD, so you won't have to do any reinstallation or BIOS reconfiguration to make this work. Head over to support.dell.com, select this system, and look at the Owner's Manual. You'll see how easy it is to swap the spinner. The hardest part will likely be obtaining the right Torx screwdriver to remove the bottom panel. Otherwise, just make sure you select a 7mm SSD rather than 9.5 and you should be golden from there.

If you absolutely insist on an external SSD solution, they perform just fine as long as you're using USB 3.0, but there are some additional things to look for beyond USB 3.0. Make sure the enclosure you buy supports SATA 6Gbps on its internal connector AND supports UASP (sometimes just called UAS), which is sort of an extension of USB 3.0 that optimizes it for bulk data transfer transactions like you have when using USB hard drives. The improvements aren't really noticeable with an external spinner since the drive itself is the bottleneck, but an SSD would be able to take advantage of the increased efficiency. Note that even if your enclosure supports UASP, you'll only be able to actually use it if you're running Windows 8 or newer. But even if you won't be on this system, I'd get the right enclosure anyway for futureproofing. If the enclosures you can find only support either SATA 6Gbps or UASP but not both, the former is more important for any modern SSD.

 

Nathand,

I too have been having many problems with my 3800 that you mention. There is just a general flakey-ness about this machine - and have no confidence that the problems are solved.

1) Intermittent wifi - as you mention, constantly losing connection or ending up in a mode that data trickles in at 0.01% - troubleshooter works sometimes, but often requires a reboot to work again.
2) General instability - Frequent BSOD, especially involving sleep mode. One time coming out of sleep mode, it lost track of the location of the SSD boot drive and required a compete system restore.
3) Frequent crashing of software that is completely stable on other machines that are identically setup.
4) Graphics issues - blinking screen that requires a reboot to fix - windows that get stuck in weird modes. Getting stuck in infinite "waiting circle"

The hard part is that none of these problems are continuous or predictable. It makes dealing with service quite difficult and time consuming as the problems won't show up on demand.

Let me know if you solve any of the issues - I'm out of the 21 day window as well, but will see if I can wheedle a deal on a swap for a 4800

tye

 

Thanks so much, very helpful advice.

 

Thanks for the update. I've check Dell's website and it claims my computer is up to date. Would it miss this update? How would you check to see the driver version number?

 

Question, Does the m3800 come with any pre-installed trial of virus-software? Also, if I were to install the 8.1 Win usb stick, does that package include McAfee or anything? Thanks