Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Absolutely mindblowing! Where did you find one? I was looking for quite some time, but never could find one. Could you tell us the reference number / ordering number?

 

What extended battery life options in Quickset?? I've seen that on other Dell systems, but not the XPS 15. is the M3800 version different? And what's Dell DPP?

EDIT: Found a Battery app by going into Quickset's Program Files directory, but checking the Extended Battery Life box grays out the Settings button that it says you're supposed to click when you enable it to manage the settings.... But when I disable it to view the settings, all it seems to do is automatically switch to Power Saver and enable Intel Display Power Saving Technology, which I've had horrible results with on other systems. It makes all of the colors wash out and some applications become unreadable.

Call Dell Spare Parts. Check out this post from a few days ago in the XPS 15 thread:

 

Dell Precision Performance Optimizer. Dials in performance settings for specific apps.

The graphics options on the M3800 look to be different. Specifically, the consumer focused Intel power saving options that screw up gamma, gamut, and brightness are not available on the M3800. Makes me think Dell chose display quality and consistency on the M3800 and absolute battery life on the XPS.

 

You don't have the Intel Display Power Saving Tech checkbox? Even if you right-click your background go to Graphics Properties > Power > On Battery? Or is it just off by default? I don't know what the default XPS setting was since I did a clean install, but it defaulted on when I installed the Intel GPU driver (and switched back on after I updated said driver).

 

I wanted to try Windows 8 and have installed a trial copy into VirtualBox. It runs but the display is only 1600x1200. Touch screen does seem to work. Does anyone think there is any way to run it in the full M3800 screen resolution in VirtualBox?

 

That's weird, Windows XP works fine (but tiny). Have you installed the guest extensions?

 

No. It just has "Graphics Power Plans", "Panel Self Refresh", and "Extended Battery Life for Gaming".

 

Yes, with a little fooling around I found the option to scale the display to the screen. I have a second 30" Dell monitor and the 1200x1600 looks pretty good scaled on that but is stretch/distorted a bit too much on the laptop screen... which is wider proportionately... but they work.

I wonder if I use the USB reinstall stick in the VirtualBox if I will get all the correct drivers for the display. I see that it is using the default Windows PnP driver, which of course is not going to get the highest resolution.

Have to say right now it is kind of cool: I have W7 running on my main 30" display and W8 running on the 15" laptop next to it.... maybe I will learn to like W8

 

Well if you do step up to 8.1 Pro, you'll be able to use Hyper-V, which on this system is just disgustingly fast. I guess it's a perk of requiring the latest processors for the latest hardware virtualization acceleration features plus the fact that Hyper-V is a Type 1 rather than Type 2 hypervisor like VMware Workstation, VirtualBox, or even Microsoft's old Virtual PC.

Another cool feature supported on Win7, Win8, and Servers 2008 R2 through 2012 R2 is Boot from VHD. So I actually temporarily shrank my BitLockered C: partition to create a new volume, and on there I just copied a Server 2012 R2 VHD file. A couple of BCDBoot commands later and I was able to boot Server 2012 R2 natively on my system, just from that VHD file. It's a killer feature for people who want to experiment quickly with different OSes on hardware or perhaps have several different hardware environments available, e.g. for demos to different people or for different configurations. Now rather than having a ton of partitions with their own folder structure, you just have a single partition with a bunch of VHDs, and you can boot any of them at will.

(Pro tip: If you spend some time with Microsoft's DISM tool, you can extract a WIM file from installation media out to a VHD and have essentially a sysprepped version of that OS ready to go for use in a VM OR Boot from VHD -- no need to boot from media and run through an installation routine. If you then create VMs or Boot from VHD instances using Hyper-V DIFFERENCING disks tied to that baseline VHD, you can create several different VMs all based off of that baseline OS image but with only an incremental storage consumption increase for each VM rather than having multiple fully independent VHDs. It's great for testing networking functionality that requires multiple VMs all running simultaneously.)

 

Caveat about Hyper-V: it disables CPU power management. Simply having Hyper-V enabled, even if you don't use it, will likely affect battery life. This probably has to do with the fact of it being Type-1 and your desktop and Windows 8 itself running *on top* of the hypervisor behind the scenes when you enable Hyper-V.

Although Hyper-V is ridiculously fast and powerful, I would stick with VirtualBox for most stuff.