Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

I've been using my m3800 since early January and I couldn't be happier. No regrets at all! By far the best laptop for my needs!

I had only minor issues: Bluetooth mouse occasionally stops working, WiFi is not always stable, occasional problems waking up from sleep mode (since shutdown and restart only take seconds, I stopped using the sleep mode at all). No major problems, nothing I can't live with.

I do hear the coil whine, but only in a very quiet room and only if I bring my ear close enough. Under normal use with a typical background noise I do not hear the coil whine at all. To me it's a non-issue.

 

Thanks very much.

 

OK thanks again, I am still waiting from a reply from dell.
I have now noticed that the network card is activated when the USB dongle is connected, I can close/restart the license server for Creo and it picks up on the adaptor without it being connected to a network which is a fix I just have to remember to always have the dongle for using Creo.

You mention the wifi MAC address, I think this is possible to just route to the wireless adaptor address, I am pretty sure we did this on a colleagues mac running bootcamp and Creo with no issue.
This would potentially also get around licensing issue and the dongle problem, I haven't tried it as I will have to apply for new license which correlates to the wireless adaptor address.

On another note I have been using the machine for a few weeks and its great, I don't have any coil whine......

 

Hi all,

My M3800 sometimes has issues connecting with wifi. It could be the routers, who knows. I was considering updating my AC 7260 driver from the intel support site, where the current version is 17.0.2 (Dell's version is 16.8.0,A03, though somehow I have 16.10.0.5 currently installed).

Would this be a bad idea? I'm wondering if I would lose the ability to turn off wifi via hotkey, etc.

 

I have to say I've had this machine for 4 weeks now and I've barely used it. Adobe is my main software and it sucks on this screen. I blame Dell as much as Adobe at this point though:

Certified to work with your software
Make sure your most-demanding applications run reliably with independent software vendor (ISV) certification — Dell’s assurance that your software performs as it was designed to.

Your M3800 mobile Workstation is certified by ISVs including:
Adobe

Nothing Adobe works w/HiDPI except for Illustrator. Changed resolution to 1920x1080 but blurry so still bumming. I bought this machine for video editing w/Premier and I cannot.

Touchpad also driving me crazy as my thumb generally sits on the "button". Have not figured out how to deactivate the button area from also being a touchpad. Makes unusable for designing.

Can't find where to even turn on Bluetooth to connect to a 3rd party touchpad. Clean install of Win8.1 and all drivers installed. Device manager says working...

Overall disappointed so far. This should be a bad machine (16gb ram/500gb+512gb Samsumg Evo/Pro SSD's) but Win 8.1 was an initial gut punch and then Adobe sucked the remaining life out of me. Add in some weird design choices by Dell as well as outright deceptive description and the experience has been frustrating

 

I'll just note that the M3800 is available with an FHD screen, which is excellent. In my opinion, there is no good reason to get the QHD screen, other than bragging rights. If your software does not properly support the high-resolution screen, your screwed, as you have seen.

 

Not a bad idea at all, and no you don't lose the hotkey option. I'm running that driver myself. Worst case you just roll back.

Yeah, the definition of "working" is pretty broad. I think ISV certification just means that they certify that the drivers for the system won't cause the tested applications to crash. How WELL it works is another question entirely. Fyi though, 1600x900 should look much better than 1920x1080 since the former is exactly half of the QHD+ panel's resolution in both directions, so you'd get perfect 1:4 pixel mapping. You might see the tiniest bit of blurring due to ClearType's subpixel smoothing algorithms, but I had to be centimeters away from my display to see it. Of course you give up more real estate compared to 1080p though.

You can't deactivate part of the trackpad, and I don't know of any trackpad, multi-touch or otherwise, that allows this. But I would hardly consider this issue something that makes the touchpad "unusable" for designing. As I told someone else in the XPS 15 thread who does the same thing as you do, you simply need to adjust your habits slightly so that your finger hovers just slightly above the touchpad rather than ON it. I guess I never encountered this issue since, upon watching my own behavior, apparently I've always done that naturally, even on laptops with with dedicated buttons. Or of course you could buy an external mouse, which is an enormous productivity booster anyway. I am frequently too lazy to connect my external mouse, but every time I do I'm amazed at how much more quickly I can work -- and I use keyboard shortcuts far more than the average person. It sounds trivial, but it's a big deal. But of course doing that rather than retaining your thumb will mean this issue will only get worse for you, since more and more laptops are going the buttonless route with their trackpads, so you'll have to adjust sooner or later.

Bluetooth is done by going to Metro's Settings icon (press WinKey+C to bring it up) > Change PC Settings > PCs and Devices, though you can get there faster if you go into Control Panel and search "Bluetooth Settings" to bring up the legacy dialog. From there you can choose to show the Bluetooth icon in the system tray, which will give you slightly faster right-click access to Bluetooth functions.

Windows 8.1 has a bit of a learning curve, but nowhere near as bad as 8.0. I'm still peeved at a few features that have been removed compared to W7, but honestly I've discovered so much more that I appreciate over W7 that I think it's overwhelmingly a net improvement. It will take some Googling to find where certain things (like some PC settings) have been moved, but I remember having to do that when W7 came out compared to XP, especially hating the Network and Sharing Center.

This is also well worth the few minutes it takes to read, even if you won't use Metro much at all: Getting around your PC - Microsoft Windows.

 

At least Optimus is usable for you. Dell makes similar sales claims about Optimus support on the M4800, despite the fact that the display wiring bypasses the integrated GPU entirely (only on units w/ the QHD display).

 

I'm unfamiliar with the Nvidia Quadro line. Which of these do I choose?

I've actually not updated my gpu drivers since I got the laptop. I remember that I tried it and chose the ODE Graphics Driver, and after updating the computer would turn the GPU off because windows reported problems with the drivers. I had to revert to whatever drivers came with the machine.

 

Did a nice SSD upgrade yesterday

Before: LiteON SSD 256GB



After: Samsung 1TB mSata :