Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

I've had problems on my M4800 with the brightness keys not working, which ended up being a bad driver. Maybe it was a temporary bug in your display driver?

 

Bravo. Couldn't agree more. The Wifi issues are a disaster on this machine (OK, maybe it's Intel's "fault" and the problems aren't unique to the machine but the problems are real. On this machine). It kills me that there is no Wifi card. See a separate forum; I eventually bailed on the wifi card entirely and switched to a USB dongle for Wifi connections. Much better but a joke that it is necessary.

 

If you had read his post you would have seen that he's not using Windows 7, unfortunately. Which may well be his problem. As an aside, among the operating systems you mentioned, the one that is obsolete is Windows 8.1 (which is a disaster Microsoft is trying to run away from as fast as they possibly can), and certainly not Windows 7.

Oh, and 802.11n is the newest current standard and thus, likewise, far from being "obsolete"; ac is not official yet.

 

Thanks for the tip on that. I've resorted to using another computer for doing complete restores and backups just to save myself the trouble. I've read on the XPS forum side that motherboard replacements didn't seem to help either, so I probably will just sit tight with what I have, even though this seems to only be affecting a few people and not a widespread issue.

Thanks for the suggestions and I'll try out 1 and 2 and see if it helps.

 

802.11ac was ratified i Januari (http://standards.ieee.org/news/2014/ieee_802_11ac_ballot.html) and Windows 7 will reach End of Support in Januari next year (http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle)

 

Don't bother. In case you haven't been following this thread for a while, Pirx has an entrenched and much-trumpeted revulsion for Windows 8.x and won't be swayed to think otherwise.

 

Hmm, indeed, I seem to have missed ratification of the ac standard. Still, that doesn't make the n standard "obsolete". The January 2015 data is irrelevant; end of support is in 2020 for Windows 7. We'll see if they manage to have a workable OS by then.

While "revulsion" is a silly word to use, it is correct that I will not use anything Windows 8.x, just like just about everybody needing to do actual work on a computer. The statistics on that are clear, and compelling.

 

If you've decided, rightly or wrongly, that Win8 for you doesn't offer anything sufficiently compelling to justify the switch, then that is of course perfectly fine. My problem is that your posts are worded to suggest that Win8 is an objectively inferior OS for anyone to be using, which is patently false. I rattled off a partial list of specific improvements in Win8 over Win7 in this post, every single one of which supports "actual work" on a computer. I have yet to see any meaningful list of drawbacks of Win8 -- in its present-day form -- compared to Win7 that makes the case against it. All I've seen are platitudes about Win8 being a disaster that Microsoft is running away from and that the market has not embraced.

Yes, Microsoft is releasing a new version of Windows faster than they have in the past. Part of that is reflective of their general shift toward more frequent iterative releases (ala Mac OS X) rather than fewer milestone releases, but you're right, part of it is because Win8 hasn't been successful on the market. Where you're wrong is in concluding that because it remains unpopular, it remains a bad product. Win8 remains unpopular because Microsoft fatally fumbled the 8.0 UI design, and even though that was addressed in 8.1 and further improved 8.1 Update 1, the take rate remains low because, as the saying goes, you only get one chance at a first impression. In 8.0, Metro was locked as the startup UI, it was unintuitive on traditional PCs, it was easy to get stuck somewhere with no apparent way back (or out), and there was no tutorial to learn how to navigate it. But 8.1 allowed you to enable logging straight onto the Desktop and added a quick Metro tutorial on first login for people who actually use it (two features which would have avoided 90% of the bad press 8.0 received all on their own), then 8.1 Update 1 made logging onto the Desktop the default setting for traditional PCs and further improved Metro, again, for people who actually use it. The end result is that if you have no desire ever to see Metro in the current 8.1 release, you never have to, except when you wish to search or when you wish to shut down your PC -- and both of those options are prominently shown in the upper-right corner and completed quickly, so it's not possible to argue reasonably that the experience for those functions is materially different from Win7.

Beyond that, the Start screen is just Pinned Start Menu items from Win7 with more area for more apps and live tile support, and "All Apps" is just "All Programs" from Win7, organized the exact same way. The Desktop UI is essentially unchanged, hardware support is identical because Win8 can happily use Win7 drivers (though Win8-specific drivers sometimes exist to support new features), and if there are software support problems, I haven't personally encountered any despite doing plenty of "actual work" on my PCs.

So again, it's perfectly fine for you to decide that Win8 is not worth it for you, but unless you can point to broadly applicable issues with it, I find it misleading and frankly misguided to claim as you have that Win8 is a disaster, inferior, not appropriate for actual work, etc.

 

I have no interest in what it is you might be reading into my posts, but the above is a blatant mischaracterization of my position. I won't waste mine nor anyone else's time with a detailed rebuttal, the record on that is clear for anyone to check.

Clearly you either haven't looked, at all, or you are confusing "any meaningful list" with "any list I agree with". I'll leave it at that.

Case in point. There's a lot more than that that has been written on the topic. It is a fact that the market has shunned Windows 8.x, more so than any other version of Windows before.

This, of course, is just a flat-out falsehood, as anyone who has ever used Windows 7 would be able to recognize immediately.

Other than that I'll note that the differences between Windows 7 and Windows 8.x go beyond the trivial superficialities you are talking about and leave it at that. Feel free to take your opinion on the subject to the appropriate forum which you, interestingly enough, have never posted in.

 

I think we should keep the debate about whether Windows 7 or Windows 8.1 is better off this forum, as well as statements that are clearly false, such as "Windows 7 is obsolete" and "Windows 8.1 is obsolete" (given the quoted link: Windows lifecycle fact sheet - Windows Help). Some prefer windows 7 and some prefer windows 8.1, and others don't care as long as they can do what they need to do on their machine (I fit in that latter category). Can we leave it at that, and focus on the M3800 here?