Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Sure! Here are a few I use day in and day out:

• Ctrl+arrow - Jump cursor between words
• Shift+arrow - Highlight selection one character (horizontal) or line (vertical) at a time in a text editor, or one file entry at a time in Windows Explorer.
• Ctrl+Shift+horizontal arrow - Highlight selection one word at a time in text editor.
• Shift+PgUp/PgDn - Highlight entire page of items at a time; useful for selecting large blocks of text in an editor or large batches of files in Windows Explorer, and from there you can fine tune your selection by continuing to hold the Shift key and using the Up/Down arrows.
• Ctrl+Home/End - Scroll to top/bottom of document (Word, browser, etc)
• Shift+Home/End - Highlight text from current cursor position to beginning/end of the line (often preceded by pressing just Home/End to jump to the beginning/end so that this can be used to highlight an entire line).
  
• F2 - Rename (works in Windows Explorer and for Excel cells)
• F4 - Select Address bar in Windows Explorer
• Esc - Almost always works as the equivalent of clicking Cancel in the active window/dialog box.
• Alt-D - Highlight Address bar in Web browser (this was one of my favorite discoveries since I'm constantly typing in URLs)
• Alt-Left/Right - Back/Forward in browsers.
• Ctrl-Tab (or Ctrl-Shift-Tab) - As opposed to Alt-Tab which cycles through applications, this cycles forwards or backwards through the windows of a single application, e.g. browser tabs, Word/Excel/Photoshop documents, etc.
• Ctrl-F4 - Whereas Alt-F4 closes an application, Ctrl-F4 will close the active window within the selected application, e.g. just the current browser tab, Word doc, etc. Incidentally, middle-clicking a browser tab will close it as well, which is useful when you want to close tabs without having to select them first.
• WinKey-D - Minimize all windows (pressing it again will restore only the windows that were not minimized before you pressed it. Great for quickly hiding what you were working on or if you need to quickly get to something on your desktop)
• WinKey-R - Open Run dialog box (from there it's handy to know certain names for stuff. Try the following: "cmd", "calc", "notepad", "mstsc", "ncpa.cpl", "devmgmt.msc", "compmgmt.msc", "diskmgmt.msc". Some of these can be accessed via the Start menu search box, but they often require more typing.)
• WinKey-Left/Right - Size the application window to occupy the left/right half of your display. Note that if you do this accidentally, repeating this combination using the opposite direction will bring the window back to its previous sizing and position. This can also be used to move applications to adjacent displays, and it even loops around your displays rather than dead-ending at the left half of the leftmost display, for example.
• WinKey-Up - Maximize the window. Same thing about pressing WinKey-Down to reverse this if done accidentally.
• Ctrl-Shift-Esc - Task Manager
• WinKey-Break - System Properties
• WinKey+Number (not on Numpad) - Opens the corresponding Taskbar-pinned icon, e.g. WinKey+1 launches the leftmost item pinned to the taskbar, WinKey+2 opens the next one, and so on.
• Alt-Enter - Brings up Properties for selected file(s), also works as Full Screen shortcut for apps like Windows Media Player and others.
• Shift-Delete - Deletes files (bypassing the Recycle Bin). Also works in mail clients like Outlook and Thunderbird (to bypass your Trash.)
• Alt-S / Ctrl-Enter - Sends an email in Outlook/Thunderbird, respectively.
• Ctrl-R - Reply to an email. Add Shift for Reply All.

Then it's great practice to use the Tab, Shift-Tab and arrow keys often, because in situations such as navigating File Properties windows, sometimes it's faster to use Shift-Tab to, for example, move up into the tab header area, then use the arrow keys to navigate to the desired tab heading, then Tab down to the button you want, then press Enter to select that button (Spacebar will also often click a button that's been highlighted by Tabbing around).

And lastly, you can learn a lot of handy shortcuts by simply tapping the Alt key. From there you should notice that the menu bar will appear (if previously hidden, as it often is these days) and the menu names will all have a single letter underlined; for Office 2007+, letters appear over the ribbon headings. Anyway, if you tap that underlined letter, that menu will open -- and for next time, you can tap that letter while holding the Alt key. But better than that, from there, most/all of the items and submenus in that menu will also have a letter underlined, so you can keep tapping the appropriate letters (no need to continue using Alt) to select the desired item and/or drill into a submenu. Or you can use the vertical arrow keys to navigate down the list and the horizontal keys to open or back out of a submenu. Of course if the final item selection you want has its own key combination, that's faster, but this enables you to learn the sequence of keys to type in order to access that particular function. So for example in Firefox I can press Alt-T, then press "i" in order to bring up the Page Info dialog. Or in Word I can press Alt-R and then W to bring up the Word Count dialog. But this is useful just for pressing Alt-F to bring up the File menu and then using the arrow keys to select the desired option in that menu or even just move over to an adjacent menu without having to remember that menu's shortcut key.

Hope this helps!

 

Yes, avoiding a dock's video output would work fine, but I personally haven't done that because I'd still have to buy the dock, and at that point I'd only be dropping from 5 cables to connect/disconnect (AC, MiniDP, HDMI, speakers, USB hub) down to 3 (AC, MiniDP, and HDMI), which isn't a significant enough reduction for me to justify the cost of a USB dock, even one that doesn't even include video out. But to answer your questions:

1. Yes, if you have the built-in panel set to Disconnected while external panels are attached, the laptop will remember this whenever that external panel is attached (or maybe when any external panel, not sure) - just as it remembers the physical positioning settings of external displays when they're re-attached. It is also smart enough to re-enable the built-in panel automatically if no external panel is enabled. I've done this multiple times successfully. Note that I'm on Win8.1, but I imagine Win7 would perform the same way.

2. This seems like the same question as #1, but again, yes.

3. Yes

4. When the external display is attached, the laptop will remember which display you configure as primary when you have it attached, so it will either switch to the external as primary or (if you last had your built-in panel as primary even while that display was attached), it will keep the external display as secondary. But of course if only one display is active, obviously that one will be primary. However, if attaching an external display causes a change in primary display and you have per-display scaling enabled and the new primary display would use a different scale factor based on its pixel density (e.g. switching from QHD+ to regular FHD), then initially, Windows will continue drawing at the original scale factor internally and just use GPU scaling to size things properly for the new display until you log off and back on, at which point it will actually re-optimize for that new primary display, which looks noticeably better. What I just described is only true of Win8.1 since only it has per-display scaling. And additionally, Windows will for example remember that you want a different setting on the Smaller/Larger slider for per-display scaling between two different display setups. So for example when I use my external panels, I set them to the leftmost setting, which is 100% scaling. When I'm using only my built-in panel, I set it on the second tick from the right, which is 150% scaling. Windows changes that for me automatically based on whether I have my external panels attached, though again I need to log off and back on for it to take full effect.

5. As I said above, you don't have to log off and back on when you switch, but until you do, things won't look ideal.

6. Yes.

 

This is GREAT. THANK YOU.

I must say this is one of my favorites too. And it doesn't seem to be one of those that you can discover by just tapping Alt and getting presented with a list of letters for further options. At least not with Chrome or IE. Being able to jump right to the address bar is HUGE and something I have used my mouse way too much for.

 

Actually I discovered that using the Alt button tap -- but that was back in IE 6 when the word "Address" was still shown to the left of the Address bar. And then it seems other browsers just adopted it. But yes you'd never discover it organically now.

I also just realized I forgot to list the keyboard shortcuts for Back and Forward in my post above. Added them, as well as a few email shortcuts.

 

Thanks for the combinations jphughan. Very useful.

 

I'm looking at buy a refurbished m3800 with the 4702hq processor.. Based in UK and eBay seems to be the best way to get an m3800 for around £1100-£1300, or $1700-$2000. Buying direct from dell is far more costly at $2500 starting price (through dell I'd get the 4712hq though).

Any reason to not get it? I'm hoping for the 512gb ssd with qhd screen

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

Many thanks again.

1) Obviously the log-off/log-on process is a bit of a pain, although I shouldn’t have to do it many times a day. Once connected to the external display as you described, has your experience been that the set-up then works flawlessly - I guess going through the hassle of the log-off/log-on would only be worth it if things work perfectly until I next needed to disconnect the laptop from the external display?

2) Back to your comparison of the M3800/E7440 docking solutions, I assume from your preference for the E7440 E-Dock that it does not have the same issues when the display scaling factor of the laptop panel is set differently to the external monitor (e.g. 1920x1080 laptop @ 150% and external monitor 1920x1080 @100% - which would be my setup)? No need to log-off/log-on to re-optimize the display, etc.?

 

Don't forget to allow the 20% VAT which you will have to pay on import. This will shrink the cost differential.

And also note that the US keyboard has some differences from the UK one with some keys moved around, a large left shift key, a small right shift key and a different shape of enter key. If you are half way to being a touch typist then these differences can be disruptive. A keyboard swap will involve a keyboard surround swap so not as cheap and easy as on notebooks with a non-separated key keyboard.

John

 

I don't know if any of you use the Dell UP2414Q monitor with this machine. Personally, I think it complements the M3800/XPS 15 very well. Just to say that Intel have recently released new drivers here:
https://communities.intel.com/thread/53655
With these drivers, the monitor, in 60Hz (Display port), is now treated a single screen (rather than two half-screens), and is a lot more reliable. You just need to manually update the driver (using device manager) as "setup" does not work.

 

1. Yes, once you've got the external display attached and (if already logged in) you've logged off and back on, then everything works absolutely flawlessly. I spend most of my time with my system in this exact setup (I use 100% scaling on my external panels) and it works just like any other system in that configuration.

2. On my E7440 I use 100% scaling even on the built-in panel, so I don't have any scaling issues to deal with when attaching external displays -- but 100% scaling on a 14" 1080p panel is pretty small even for me at 29 years old with better than 20-20 vision. 125% would probably be more comfortable, but on that system I do dock and undock a fair amount, so I decided that the extra real estate, being able to avoid application-specific scaling issues, and not having to do the logoff/logon dance was worth having tinier UI elements. But at the end of the day, what I said in the post you quoted above holds true regardless of the particular scale factors, the system, the docking method (if any), or display connector type: If you're already logged in when you attach an external display on which you wish to use a different scale factor and you're using per-display scaling and you want that external display to be primary, you'll need to log off and back on for things to look right. The only difference with the E7440 would be that since the current and target scale factors aren't as far apart (e.g. currently 125% but wanting 100% with an external display attached vs going from 200% to 100%), things will look better even before the logoff/logon -- but still not completely optimal.