Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

@dactor: I'm glad that I could help. So far, I've read about 2 people complaining about the sturdyness of the M3800. One of them said, that the top cover of the Dell M3800 is like an aluminium can. I've applied quite some force on the aluminium and simply can't confirm it. Might have been a rare issue. The other user let his notebook fall on the floor. Well, no one can guarantee you, that a notebook won't take any damage by falling down 1 meter without any protection.
I've been transporting the M3800 daily, without any issues so far (I'm traveling about 3 hrs per day, using a Deuter Giga Bike and Tuff-Luv Cub-Skinz Neoprene sleeve). Overall, I wouldn't say, that the M3800 is indestructable, but it's definitely sturdier than the T440s. Just make sure to get a Neoprene sleeve, it will greatly help keeping your device shiny new. If you still aren't 100% sure about the M3800, you also might look at the HP Zbook 15 or bite the bullet and go for a MacBook Pro.

@dme123: 3 hours battey life - what does your workload look like? I can easily hit 6 - 8 hours with surfing, reading PDFs and programming.

 

@tolga9009

thanks again.... I do lots of mathematical and financial modeling and now my 2013 excel is crashing half way an analysis that my 2010 was doing with no problems... that was my sign to move on from a Core Due into a new machine..(its time)... I like apple as it was my first laptop ever when it was early 1990 but can no do now with all the new keyboard shortcuts and software needed on WIN to move into apple... I like the HP Zbook but it looks too bulky!

Oh plus I like to have virtual desktops with virtual machines on the same laptop.....

 

To update everyone on this, as usual jphughan comes through again. I found one of his older posts and installed an earlier Synaptics driver (the new one will not install for me), and things are a lot better now. It still isn't perfect, but the trackpad is definitely way more usable than it was with the Dell drivers. The newest Dell driver (at least for me) sucked, and I would steer clear of them at all costs. I was getting a lot of random dead spots and the overall reliability wasn't very good at all.

 

When you mention that you can't install the new Synaptics driver, are you using Windows 8.x?

I've had to install the latest drivers on another machine I have and you have to disable driver signature enforcement to get them to install.

 

Right, I am typing this on my 'new' M3800 from Outlet UK. First thing I noticed was the coil whine... I knew it was to be expected, especially ordering via Outlet, we will see if I can live with that.

With that out of the way, can I just ask: who on earth would install OS on HDD instead of SSD when available?! I could not believe my eyes when I saw it. Is it a norm on refurbished machines? Obviously, there is no backup usb or whatever it is called (computers through outlet are sold without it), so now I have to go through the hassle of downloading and installing windows from scratch. Unbelievable! Has anyone else experienced this?

EDIT: I did a copy of the recovery partition onto a usb drive, did a full recovery, but as there was no option to select the drive you would like to have your os on, the software simply went on to reinstalling the os on the hdd... this is nuts! I could not see any option in bios to disable hdd completely. Is there any way to install os on msata drive without having to open the laptop and unplug the hdd?

 

Yes, I am on Windows 8.1, I will try that and report back my results.

Thanks!

EDIT: I just disabled this and I am still getting an error that says the drivers can't install. I think someone else in this thread tried and had the same issue. I have been able to install a previous Synaptics driver, but the newest one is just a no-go for whatever reason.

To be honest, I am still not that thrilled with any of the drivers that I have found. The most frustrating thing to me is that the touchpad works better with no drivers installed at all. I really prefer how this feels. The part about that that sucks is that now I can't use my 2-finger scroll. If there was some way to get that working without installing drivers at all, I would be ok with this touchpad.

 

I read that this worked for at least some newer versions too, but I don't really consider disabling the driver signature requirement an acceptable workaround. Malicious drivers have become a more common tool for malware to use to infect systems because that provides an extremely high level of access to the system.

 

I think I may have spoken too soon. Even the other drivers that I installed are giving me issues. Now when I click and drag, my mouse goes veering off in the direction I was dragging all on it's own. I am still having some reliability issues with clicks not registering and other oddities as well. I have gone over and over every possible setting, but I can't seem to get this touchpad to act consistently. Does anyone have any other suggestions? Am I the only one seeing this?

I really want to like this machine, but this touchpad is absolutely killing it for me. I hate this keyboard font too, but that is something that I can at least adjust to. I am trying to decide between this and a MacBook Pro with Retina Display (I currently have both and will be getting rid of one), but if this M3800's touchpad's performance can't be improved over what I am seeing, then my decision just got a lot easier. While I totally realize the Precision's touchpad performance will not be on the level of the MacBook Pro's, what I am currently seeing is kind of outrageous. I owned a Precision M6600 for years, and if I could get the M3800's touchpad performance at least to that level, then I would be totally happy.

 

Are you maybe resting one finger on the touchpad at all times, perhaps in the click area? If so, that's probably your problem. That would cause a lot of false registrations of multi-touch gestures. If you have a habit from previous laptops with dedicated click buttons of keeping your finger on that button rather than hovering your finger slightly over that button, it's time to retrain yourself. If that's not your issue, I'm not sure what else to suggest.

 

That may be part of my issue. I have gotten somewhat used to it with the MacBook Pro because I can do that and have no issues whatsoever. Even when I am not doing that, I am still seeing some odd behaviors though. Are you not seeing this at all? I don't know. As I said, I owned a Precision M6600 and I never remember having issues like this. This is easily the worst trackpad I have ever used, which is disappointing given the fact that the M3800 is a mobile workstation.

There are some positives to this machine, but the touchpad is really making me hesitant to keep this thing long-term. If I used a mouse 90% of the time I probably wouldn't care, but given the fact that I use the touchpad 85% of the time, this kind of sucks. I knew it wouldn't be perfect, but I didn't know it would be this bad either.