Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Oh, I meant, it weighs more than I expect (when looking at it). It weights exactly 2.01 kg on our digital scale (for mail).

 

Alright, thanks. Let's see how mine does. I've looked at the list of updates on Dell's website, and the latest were labeled January of this year, so hopefully by now the machines they send out come updated from the factory. Yeah, I know, dream on...

 

I am sticking with Win 7 due to some of the apps we use. And because I don't have time to learn and tweak Win 8.1 right now, on a Win 7 office environment.


I got my system a little more than a month ago. When I received it, the Win 7 driver updates did not show up on dell support analyzing my system using their utility.

The big issues have been the cursor circle, which is resolved by rapidly running my figure over the touchpad. Major WiFi connection issues. Win 7 wifi dirvers then showed up that fixed many of the drop issues. They were dated in January prior to when I received the system. So I don't know why it took so long to show up on the dell support site. A new router fixed the rest of the connection problem at home, which was a major one.

The only issue I have left is that the system coming out of sleep or hibernate (whichever it Is actually doing) when on battery hangs and freezes requiring a hard reboot quite often. But not every time.

 

Get the latest GPU drivers direct from Intel and NVIDIA. And fyi, it's never a bad idea to use the Dell Support site to list all available downloads rather than filtering by your service tag or a utility. Service tag listing has been shown to be incomplete or incorrect at times, and a utility may not be able to detect everything (e.g. touchscreen firmware version). But chances are the GPUs have newer drivers available direct from their respective vendors.

 

Does anyone know the exact installation order of drivers?
My M3800 was perfect out of the box. However, I later added a Crucial 480GB mSATA SSD drive and took the 2.5 HDD out to make the machine even quieter and faster to boot, load and save. It's dead quiet now and the only noise comes from the fans and only when I render. BTW I now have room for a 91Whr battery and will consider getting one when they become available. Anyway, after I did a clean install of Win8.1 and installed all the drivers from the Dell support site (and Crucial site) I had all sorts of things wrong with the system. I can't quite remember which things because I did another install straight away. This time I installed the drivers in the correct order and not as they are listed on the Dell site which is alphabetical. I must have got the order right because it's all working again beautifully. I hadn't read the instructions which were on the same page as the downloads. And, as vague as they are (system drivers first, chipset etc.) could it be possible that the order is even more crucial than stated? Could the factory have gotten the order wrong for some of you who have problems? It's just a thought.

 

Dell doesn't clean install every laptop, they just slam their standard image there, so for those having problems with the factory install it's not that.

Driver install order shouldn't matter except where dependencies are concerned, but I have personally found that in order to avoid strange and rare problems, you should start with things like the chipset driver, SATa drivers, then the rest. If there is a free fall sensor, you might want to install that among the first batch of drivers as well. I usually do video drivers early too, but just for the sake of getting the full display resolution.

 

Agreed. The only dependencies I'm aware of from experience with the XPS 15 are:

- If you'll be using both, Intel Smart Response must be enabled before setting up Rapid Start (though keep enough of the cache unit's capacity unused by Smart Response in order to create a Rapid Start partition if you'll be using that)
- Intel Rapid Start should have its hibernation partition properly set up before installing the application (from Intel's install guide, not sure it's mandatory)
- Intel Management Engine must be installed before the NFC driver will install (doesn't apply to the M3800 though since it doesn't have NFC).

Other than that I don't think sequence matters, but just out of force of habit I tend to do things approximately in order of perceived importance, which would basically be this order:

Chipset
GPUs
Audio
Intel Rapid Storage (AHCI/RAID driver)
WiFi
Bluetooth
Intel Management Engine
Intel Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework
Airplane Mode Switch
Card Reader
Touchpad
Intel Rapid Start (optional)
Intel Smart Connect (to keep Device Manager happy, though you can disable it in the application if you have no use for it)
Freefall Sensor (even on an SSD-only system to keep Device Manager happy, though you can disable it in the Control Panel applet).

 

So when you go to the NVidia site to see what drivers they might have, this is what you get if you use the NVidia utility to detect your system:

The manufacturer of this system requires that you download the driver for your GPU from their support site.

The GeForce M series and GeForce Go series notebook GPUs use drivers that have been customized by the notebook manufacturers to support hot key functions, power management functions, lid close and suspend/resume behavior. NVIDIA has worked with some notebook manufacturers to provide notebook-specific driver updates, however, most notebook driver updates must come from the notebook manufacturer. Additionally, the desktop GeForce graphics drivers will not install on Geforce M series and Quadro M series notebook GPU's.

 

Don't use the utility. If you specify the GPU manually you can download the driver package, and it installs just fine. Or just use this link: http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/74066/en-us.

I've never liked the idea of cluttering up my system with unnecessary browser plug-ins and other detection utilities (that incidentally don't always deliver complete and accurate results) when I can avoid that and achieve an equal or better result by simply selecting what I want on the website in question manually.

 

thank you. Is there a touchpad driver on the synaptics site that fixes the spinning circle hanging issue? The synaptics site promises dire things if one does not use the OEM drivers.