Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

On my XPS 15 running Win 8.1, I'm using Synaptics driver 16.3.15.1, which you can still find on download sites if you Google that specific version. I don't have the spinning circle issue you're describing, but I also doubt that would be solved with drivers. If I'm thinking of the right animation, that typically means a background task is doing some work, in which case I'd be surprised if moving your finger around on the touchpad resolved it; I'd bet that was a coincidence. In any case, I guess it can't hurt to give those drivers a try. You may as well also install the touchscreen firmware update, which despite the name has been confirmed to also improve the touchpad.

 

Alright, I got the machine, and have done some basic setup; so far next to no third-party software installed. Here are my impressions.

Build quality:
Excellent, even close to perfect, I would say. Fit leaves nothing to be desired, I have no dead pixels, and no dust under the glass of the LCD. The closing action of the lid is nice and smooth. Compared to my Samsung Series 9, which has a bit of a "snap-shut" at the very end of the closing motion, the Dell doesn't do that, but one still gets the feeling of a positive closing force. As for the finish, I am not a fan at all of that "soft touch" surface on the deck (entire surface around keyboard and touchpad), but I guess I can live with it. I will say, however, that in my view it doesn't look too good, let alone professional, and it is definitely a dust magnet and not easy to keep clean. Oh well, it's Dell, they always have to screw up something at least... The keyboard itself looks fine; the funky font bothers me less than I thought.

Oh, and as others have said, the machine does feel heavy for such a slim device. Not a problem for me, but be warned that this one is a lot heavier than most other Ultrabooks.

Keyboard:
Seems fine to me, but keep in mind I'm the "hunt-and-peck" type, so whatever I say on the topic has little to no value. Except for this: I do hate the removal of dedicated Home, End, and Page-UP/Down keys. Stupid decision in my opinion. The spacing of the existing keys is very wide, and narrowing that down in exchange for those keys would have been a good decision. I also would have much preferred to have the traditional function keys (F1-F12) as the default, rather than the function row defaulting to various additional functions (speaker, brightness, etc.), and having to use a modifier key to get the standard F-keys functionality. Those are some really bad decisions for a workstation-class machine. Probably fine for a gaming rig, but this is not supposed to be one... Does anyone know if there's a way to reprogram this so the F-keys are default?

Screen:
Definitely one of the highlights. I have "just" the FHD screen, and it is simply gorgeous! By far one of the best screens of this type I have ever seen anywhere, period. Absolutely puts the so-so screen on the Samsung to shame. Viewing angles are as close to 180 degrees as it would even make sense given the glossy surface of the glass on top. Reflections are, of course, an issue, even though the screen is plenty bright. Some people claim to be able to use certain laptops outdoors, but I have never found one where I wanted to do that, at least not in the sun. This one is no exception to this rule.

Performance:
The machine boots to the Welcome screen (Windows 7, of course) in about 7 seconds or so, which is on par with my Samsung Series 9. This is with the somewhat mediocre LiteON 256GB SSD mSATA drive it came with. With a faster drive, things should improve even more. Windows Performance indices are: Processor 7.6, Memory (16GB): 7.8, Graphics: 7.0 for both, and 7.9 for the disk. Thus it beats my M6400 on all scores, according to this. Not really interested in more in-depth performance scores, but there's plenty of those on the web. Battery life when fully charged is shown as 10 hours (91Wh battery), but that's just what the indicator showed at some point. This doesn't really mean anything right now; again, more testing required to firm up this one.

Issues:
Pretty much zero, so far. No problem waking from sleep, "spinning circle" issues, nothing. I tried putting the machine to sleep and waking it back up, and saw no problems so far, but I understand that this may not happen every time, so more testing may be required. Wireless performance has been fine so far, with no dropouts. This is our WiFi network at work, and I haven't tried it at home (on my older NetSys router) yet, so stay tuned on that.

My feeling is that I have all the newest drivers and firmware installed, but I'm not sure how to find out regarding the touchscreen (BIOS is A02). I ran the detection on Dell's support site, and it came back with three drivers to update. It turned out two of those (Intel Drivers) were updated already (at least, after re-running the detection with those updates installed, the site still claimed they needed updating), the third one was an Intel Bluetooth driver.

Going through my Event Logs, there were two issues in the Application log: One is a WMI error that appears on all new Windows 7 installs (it's simply a screw-up in Windows 7 Setup), and that can be resolved with a fix from Microsoft's knowledge base.
The other one has me stumped, so far: There's two error messages coming from Intel's Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework Driver. Source is DptfEvent with EventIDs 2 and 3, and they show up roughly once every hour. I searched the web, and it doesn't even seem to be clear if the driver that is responsible for those does anything useful at all, at least on the M3800. Alienware machines seem to have some interface in their BIOS setup that allows one to take advantage of the additional thermo-regulation/power-saving capability that this offers, but the M3800 (and even the XPS 15, I believe) do not. In any case, the error is probably harmless. But, I am somewhat anal about stuff like that, and I really like a clean Event Log...

Bottom Line:
I'm happy with the machine so far, and that's high praise from me. I am hard to please. With a dock, this could have been perfect...

P.S.: For completeness, I forgot to mention: No coil whine, at all.

 

I for one really appreciate your insights. You seem to be fairly critical/hard to please (as you stated), so hearing your impressions gives me some hope that the M3800 may be worth buying after all. So you are on Windows 7 Pro and you are seeing no major issues at all? I would like to avoid Windows 8 as well (probably for similar reasons as you), so Windows 7 working correctly is priority number one for me.

 

Yes, nothing at all, not even minor (unless you count those DptfEvents). Keep in mind, this is after a couple of hours of use, but so far things look very good.

 

"Does anyone know if there's a way to reprogram this so the F-keys are default?"

It's in the bios, on the second tab. That was actually one of the first things I did.

John

 

That is encouraging news. Thanks for that information. I really don't want to go the Macbook Pro route, so the M3800 is pretty much my only shot at getting something with a similar form factor, yet fully Windows-based (don't want to have to run Parallels or Bootcamp).

 

Ahah, excellent! Thanks, rep given.

 

I changed mine in the Mobility Center. But perhaps that's just a Win8.1 thing.

 

Pirx,
Glad to hear you like it so far. I'm very happy with mine even though I don't overall prefer Win 8 to Win 7 (with the aftermarket start button the differences are small). This certainly is a very nice machine (as it should be for the cost).

 

Well after several problems with my first M3800 i returned it to Dell. well more specifically, they sent me a replacement. Here is the problem...the replacement is an FHD display as opposed to what I paid for which is a QHD+ display. This is the 3rd one that has problems as it has both a coil wind AND a display that decides on its own to get darker and lighter whenever it chooses. What would u do? They offered me 1 extra year of support for the mistake. What would u do?