Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

So, I opened it and installed a 256 GB msata and 480 GB 2.5'' ssd, and after secure erasing the msata ssd with parted magic and doing fresh win 8.1 install, the wifi-card suddenly got killed.

It's dead, I believe, as I have tried various installation methods. Its not being recognized, not in windows and linux. The lspci-command in linux shows nothing about the network controller at all.

Luckily and for some strange reason, I have another 7260 AC adapter which is just there in the box

I'm gonna try to install that before sending it in, and will be back here with a new post if things go well....

By the way, the touchpad is too sunken to the left, is that normal ? Can it be fixed or will it sink even more with time ?

Regards

 

I'd look for wraps advertised the XPS 15 since I would imagine they'd be targeted more at that market -- though I don't know whether even they exist since I haven't looked. That's, um, quite a look. And you thought the Dell logo looked hideous? Different strokes, I guess.

In all seriousness though, that actually might work reasonably well since the M3800's touchpad is black, and also assuming the wrap covers the edges of the lid. However, there's a high possibility that the weave of the wrap won't match the weave size of the real carbon fiber base if that's the type of thing that might bug you.

 

If you think that's quite a look, go find the post in the M4800 owners thread where someone put fake leather vinyl all over their machine...shudder.

As long as they are happy with it, I guess.

 

I actually found this and it would fit perfectly. Of course, I would apply it myself.

And another thing; is the coil whine issue still ongoing? I will be ordering my m3800 soon and do not want an unsolved issue on a new model..

 

Yes. Please keep an eye on this thread for updates on that front: http://en.community.dell.com/support-forums/laptop/f/3518/p/19536279/20661649.aspx#20661649. But the latest word is that the fix for existing customers should be available by mid-August because the redesigned boards are being prioritized for new orders -- but the Dell rep in the linked thread has not been able to provide a firm answer as to whether new orders are already shipping with the new boards, and if not, when that would start.

 

I bought the low end M3800 and added 8GB RAM and the Crucial M500 mSATA. I had fits getting the M3800 to recognize the M500: I spent some serious time in a chat window with a Dell Workstation Technician and never got it going. The next day I was able to get the Crucial Tech in a chat session and he determined I had to change the SATA drive via the device manager:



I could have sworn after we did this, the mSATA showed up in the Drive Manager as Drive 0, but things have changed since then...

The Dell guy sent me a thumb drive with Windows 7 Pro media so I could do a fresh install and [theoretically] get the OS and Dell recovery partition moved to the mSATA. Well, when I tried that (it is pretty automatic, not allowing any choices before copying the Windows 7 Pro installation to the disk of its choice, LOL), it pretty much came up in the end telling me it was unable to locate drivers and went back to recovery from the Hybrid drive.

I was thinking the next step might be to unplug the Hybrid and try installing from the thumb drive media to the mSATA, but the comment above and other comments in this thread are giving me pause. The UEFI boot settings, MBR, BCD files is kind of new to me. I'm not sure how much time to invest learning all the requisite stuff versus just throwing down for a 2.5" Samsung EVO and ditching the Hybrid drive. I'm sure I could use it as a second drive in my daughter's school laptop or something.

I like the thought of having the Dell Recovery partition as it is pretty convenient (and the price is right too), but if I have to I can just go get native Windows 7 Pro and partition the drives the way I want to. I had to do this to roll my wife's Dell back from Windows 8 to Windows 7. The obvious pain there is going and finding all the needed drivers on the Dell site.

I am sure a lot of folks might not understand why we would prefer Windows 7 but we both work in the corporate environment where that is what is what we use and know.

Can anyone comment on the value [or ease] of using the Dell media and trying to create the recovery partition, etc. vs just doing a fresh Windows install? Other than the obvious? $

 

To my knowledge, the Dell media will not create the image restore partition; it is just a vanilla Windows installer with some tweaks to install on Dell systems without prompting for a key in the case of the Win7 media -- but I believe that's it. However, I've read that on these systems, you MUST use the custom Dell Win7 media in order for the systems to activate, because apparently M3800s even when ordered with Windows 7 without the free Windows 8.1 upgrade do not have Windows 7 keys embedded into them, nor do they have printed Product Keys -- and as a result, installations from bog standard Win7 media will not activate properly. Someone chronicled their grief dealing with this in this thread a while back. Windows 8.x media does not have this issue, should you ever decide to upgrade.

Additionally, your phrase about doing "a clean install and moving over your OS and recovery partition" makes no sense. Either you're doing a clean install and moving nothing over, or you're cloning your OS and recovery partition. You can't do both.

I would say that if you're comfortable doing a clean install, go for it. Disconnect the hybrid drive temporarily, install onto the mSATA drive, reconnect the hybrid drive, wipe it, and move on with life. You'd only end up with BCD issues if you were attempting to dual boot or clone one disk to another (in which case you'd have that issue whether you were cloning to a 2.5" Evo or an mSATA drive), and you're unlikely to have UEFI issues at all unless you've manually customized the Dell Windows 7 media because there are tweaks required to allow the Windows 7 installer to launch in UEFI mode. If you haven't made those, then Windows 7 will install in BIOS mode even if your system is configured to support UEFI -- which on Win7 is fine because it doesn't really take advantage of UEFI features anyway. If you were installing Windows 8, I'd recommend getting UEFI set up correctly. Also, from what I've read here, the M3800 ships in Legacy mode rather than UEFI mode anyway, in which case it wouldn't even allow UEFI booting in its default configuration.

You also absolutely do not need your mSATA drive to show up as Drive 0 to install Windows onto it. The Crucial rep sent you down a rabbit hole making driver changes because drive numbering happens at the UEFI/BIOS level, so no amount of driver tweaks would affect that -- and any of the drivers in that screenshot should have detected the drive properly, so driver tweaks wouldn't have solved that issue either. However, check your BIOS to make sure that your SATA Operation is set to AHCI and that Intel Smart Response is disabled -- otherwise the mSATA slot will be configured to accept an mSATA cache module for the 2.5" drive, not a fully independent drive.

If you really want to keep a recovery partition, you could always use a free cloning tool to capture your current environment to a file and store it somewhere, either on an external drive, a separate partition on the new drive when you set it up, etc. Windows 7 even has a built-in "Create a system image" function for this purpose, but it is extremely picky about restores (you must restore all partitions that existed on the source disk, and the new disk must have at least as much total capacity as the source, regardless of how much storage was actually in use), so that can create headaches later.

Feel free to PM me if you need any extra help getting this set up to avoid making an already long thread even longer. And if this would help you feel more confident doing a clean install, I've already put together an M3800 Rebuild Cheat Sheet for other people here who felt a bit daunted doing a clean install; it walks you through the entire process, including listing every driver you'll need. I've posted it twice elsewhere in this thread, and although it's based on Windows 8.1, I can adapt it fairly quickly to Windows 7.

 

jphughan,

Thanks for the info. I already found out the pitfalls of changing the BIOS around. Had all kinds of fits getting it reconfigured correctly. I wish I had a better understanding of what AHCI and Intel Smart Response are - I don't mind following instructions but it sure is a lot better when you actually have an understanding of what the meaning of the settings are. The BIOS has the settings, but no "tips" as to what they actually do.

I suppose I will have to read up a bit to help me get it figured out, if there is not a simple explanation.

The only reason I like the idea of a recovery partition is convenience. I have never had a system where I used a recovery partition for any length of time, but I thought it might be handy.

I'll try disconnecting the Hybrid. I will update my progress, but I am going to be traveling over the next 5 days or so with my kids so I won't want to start from scratch since this is the rig I will be using on the trip.

Thanks again man.

Rick

 

P.S.: Honestly, the mSATA never worked until I changed that setting in the Device Manager. The BIOS and Windows 7 recognized the presence and capacity of the drive, but I could not format it. Even after a clean to remove the MBR, not any way would it let me format. I could create a partition, but not format it.

Then, after going to the 1.0 and rebooting, it was able to format.

FWIW

 

AHCI stands for Advanced Host Controller Interface. It's a fancy name for improvements to the original SATA spec that newer drives (and especially SSDs) can leverage for improved performance. Legacy mode disables those enhancements, and as a result drives that support AHCI end up running more slowly. Intel Smart Response is a tool that allows you to use a (typically 32-64GB) mSATA SSD as a cache for a 2.5" spinning drive rather than as a standalone drive, and as a result if the BIOS is configured with that enabled, the mSATA SSD is not usable as a fully standalone drive. The XPS 15 has a spec that ships with a 32GB mSATA cache and a 1TB spinning drive, so you end up with a 1TB drive whose performance is increased by having that mSATA cache -- but that configuration appears as a single drive in Windows.

You should not have to fall back to that driver you highlighted in order to make your SSD work, and doing so will very likely degrade your performance. For example, I'm not sure whether that driver will pass TRIM commands, and it definitely would not have chipset-specific optimizations that the correct Intel driver would. That is a workaround at best, not a real solution, and therefore I do not recommend settling for that configuration.