Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

If it consistently degrades after a certain period of time, that sounds more like a driver issue than a hardware issue. Make sure you're running either Dell's latest driver or the older reference Synaptics driver 16.3.15.1 that installs without workarounds.

 

Hi all - I'm having problems with my external mouse + USB ports + Windows shutdown freezing up using the latest (or older) Dell Touchpad driver. I am trying to use the Synaptics 16.3.15.1 but it just sits at the "Please wait while the drivers install .." screen.

I am running Windows 7 64.

Any ideas?

 

Did you uninstall the Dell Touchpad drivers before you tried to install the Synaptics drivers? And how long are you waiting at that "Please wait" prompt. I can't remember how long mine took, but the driver package is surprisingly massive (over 200MB, probably due to the video demonstrations of the gestures), so you'll likely have to wait longer than you'd expect a touchpad driver installation to take.

 

Yes.. uninstalled the Dell drivers. Waiting maybe 10 mins? The driver produced a weird Intel chipset error as it was installing.. no response beyond that.

 

If you got an error during installation, the details of that error are likely to be relevant to the failure. Any chance you can provide more information there? Meanwhile, do you have the Intel Chipset and Intel Management Engine drivers installed?

 

Does M3800 have similar issues with WiFi as his twin XPS 15?
I recently had the XPS 15 (L521X), which I had to return, because support was no able to resolve the WiFi problem.

Before buying M3800 I have some concerns, cause it is the same case.
I will be grateful for your response.

 

Checking in after a while, the notebook has been, alright so to speak. It does its main job well, though it's been giving me a ton of flak in other places in the meantime.

I'm on BIOS A05, most drivers are updated from the OEM, and the entire computer is running Win8.1 bitlocked. Plextor M5M SSD was added later on and a 1TB WD Blue was also swapped in, one little beast of a rig.

In the time that I've spent with it though, there have been some problems that I'm wondering whether any other people have run into. I haven't been on the thread in a while, tried to dig around, sorry if I missed a post or two

First the audio jack isn't very friendly. I don't have any 4 pin connector headphones (the ones with 3 rings), just the standard headphone connector. The jack has a tendency to just spit out my headphones over time, letting the speakers blare and freaking out people around me. I've gotten around this with an external sound card that I usually use anyways.

Second the touchscreen has a tendency to fall asleep. I've gotten around it again by using device manager and disabling selective suspend for its USB controller (it's one of the "USB Input Devices" under Human Interface Devices in device manager). It seems like it degraded and is starting to just randomly ignore my presses lately though, which prompted me to just go and install A05 (didn't help much).

The screen also has an odd tendency to flicker in the first few minutes after booting, as if it's warming up or something. Haven't called it in, as updating graphics drivers seems to help sometimes.

Finally the battery wear is, well, quite bad. I got one of the first models, and have been basically cycling the unit through my year in school; my wear is now at 20% (48760 mWh, eek.). Anyone know if this is warrantyable...?

 

I usually use regular headphones or external speakers in the audio jack and have never had an issue with it falling out. Not sure what to tell you on that one. Have you tried a different pair of headphones to rule out just that one device?

For the touchscreen, if you've already disabled selective suspend, try installing the touchscreen firmware update from support.dell.com, which is separate from the BIOS update. The touchscreen firmware update has been confirmed by multiple people to address the sleep and failure to resume issue. It also apparently improves the touchpad, according to several users.

For the display, right-click your background and go to Intel Display Properties > Power > On Battery and disable Intel Display Power Saving Technology. If your flickering is occurring even on AC, that sounds like a hardware issue.

 

The M3800's twin is the XPS 15 9530. The L521X is the previous generation. And no, the WiFi problems from that machine don't exist anymore on the new XPS 15 or the M3800. There were some initial issues around launch, but the vast majority of those were fixed with a driver update. The few remaining issues reported in the XPS 15 thread seem to be specific to that user's environment, router, firmware level, etc, but those are a few isolated cases that you're likely to hear with any laptop, not widespread trends endemic to this model.

 

I have wireless problems with my XPS 15. As soon as the wireless signal is only "good" (and not "excellent"), the Intel card has great difficulty in obtaining and maintaining the connection. I can plug in a small wifi dongle and even though the signal strength is lower (because of its small aerial), it will still keep the connection better than the internal WIfi.

It's not something unique to the XPS15/M3800, there is a long thread about Intel AC7260 problems here:
https://communities.intel.com/thread/44899?start=165&tstart=0

If you have excellent signal strength, it's not a problem.