Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Hi,

Last friday, had a party, and the M3800 was broken out to take the role of Youtube-player for the guests. The video would momentarily freeze, say, every 10 mins, whilst my M18x R2 later did it perfectly.

All attempts to update the video drivers resulted in the machine requiring a 'refresh' to boot again. In addition, it was very fiddly to have Win 8 apps pop up, take over the screen etc. In addition, as I saw on my M18x, the CPU is busy much more often, whilst the Win 7 machines rest at 0% usage mostly.

So I hated it on my M18, and I hate it here too. The Mrs decreed Win 8 had to go, and gone it is.

Win 7 Pro is installed, and we couldn't be any happier. No random CPU demands, and with 200% scaling set, the screen is beautiful also. However, as well as the touch-screen works under Win 7 - fingerprints all over it mean it will be consigned to history as a gimmick.

Dare I say the machine feels snappier too....

Also, there is no mention of a usb < > ethernet adapter on my build list, so looks like I don't get one for purchasing state-side.

Peace out.

 

I bought my daughter a MacBook Air for Christmas and playing around with it reminded me of one of the major issues plaguing my M3800 (and all PC notebooks in general)..... The Touchpad. Every single Windows notebook I've used has an abysmal touchpad... whether behind-the-scenes it's by Synaptics or Alps or whoever. They're all varying degrees of bad.

Granted, the M3800/XPS15 touchpad is better than many others, but that's not saying much:

On the M3800 2-Finger scrolling often doesn't work on the first try. Also, sensitivity and speed are set to intuitive defaults out-the-box on the MacBook, whereas on the M3800 you need to tweak them in control panel to ensure that, for instance, a typical scroll moves a page at a time rather than sending you all the way to the bottom of a web page.

Right-clicking deserves it's own paragraph. For me, 2-finger right-click NEVER works because of a deformity on my finger... yet, it works beautifully on the MacBook EVERY time. Since I can't use 2-finger right-click, I try to use the lower corner, but a click there sometimes registers as a left-click no matter how far to the bottom right I am. In Windows Explorer this usually means the icon I'm selecting goes into rename mode, meaning I then have to click out of it. In other places it means I lose the selection of the text I'm highlighting. It's maddening!!!! I wish I could use FN+CLICK for right-clicks but there is no such setting anywhere. I tried Autohotkey but it doesn't recognize FN and using CTRL means I lose other functionality. Yada yada.

As Apple's market share continues to increase, I hope the PC industry takes note of things like this.

 

Intuitive is pretty subjective - I can't stand the Apple "natural scrolling" or whatever the hell they call it. Yes, it makes sense on a touchscreen, where it's a direct mapping (like interacting with a real piece of paper), but on something like a touchpad it makes zero sense (to me).

I have no complaints about the touch pad on my M4800, beyond that I had to reverse the two finger scroll direction (thanks to every manufacturer deciding that something must be good, since Apple's doing it).

 

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the M4800 isn't a clickpad like the M3800. The M3800 wouldn't be so bad (for me) if it had dedicated buttons. But the right-click inaccuracy drives me insane, coupled with the 2-finger sensitivity problems. Having said all that, it is better than the horrendous clickpad on the new Lenovo workstations, which are even worse. But, yeah, relatively speaking, it is light years worse than the MacBook.

As for the "intuitive" thing, I don't know anybody that doesn't go into Mouse settings on a laptop to configure their touchpad to their liking. You can do this too on a MacBook too... but I would be willing to put down money that the percentage of MacBook users that do this is way smaller than on the PC side.

 

You're correct. The 4800 has dedicated buttons. Sorry for the confusion, from your earlier post it wasn't clear to me you were specifically talking about clickable touchpad.


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

That is the single biggest thing that drove me to a Macbook Pro. I just couldn't stand the touchpad on the M3800. It's abysmal in my opinion. I am looking to move back to the PC world, and I have been waiting for Dell to announce a possible refresh to the M3800, hoping that maybe the touchpad would get some attention. Unlike most people, I use my touchpad quite a bit, so this is a very big deal to me as well.

The screen on the M3800 is gorgeous, it's a powerful machine, and it has a pretty good number of ports, but that touchpad is just killing it for me.

 

What's hilarious is that the touchpad on the M3800 is actually pretty good compared to every other touchpad-clickpad in the PC market. It's probably the best. It's easy to think "well, this is just a limitation of the technology." That is, unless you use a MacBook and then you realize just how amazingly good a touchpad can be.

My daughter and I just sat our laptops next to each other Christmad Day and I showed her how 2-finger scroll failed to recognize my fingers about 80% of the time. If I position my fingers a certain way I could improve it to 50/50. And when I tried it on her MacBook, it just worked beautifully every single freakin' time.... out the box! not a single tweak... with a deformed finger! Not a single missed scroll where the pointer shoots up or down instead of scrolling. The 2-finger right-click worked flawlessly too. And CTRL+CLICK option was a great option too. On the PC side CTRL+CLICK does other things, but is it so hard to maybe make FN+CLICK work? It seems something that the Dell BIOS + QuickSet could do.... if they thought about it.

 

Yeah I know. For some reason the touchpad is some mysterious thing that Apple has designed so well that no other manufacturer seems to be able to even come close to replicating. I honestly don't know if other manufacturers just don't care enough, or if they are just that incompetent. You would think it would be as easy as buying a Macbook Pro, tearing it apart, and then mimicking the touchpad design, but apparently that's just too complicated for anyone else to pull off.

Every time I go from using a PC touchpad back to a Macbook Pro touchpad, it feels like a breath of fresh air. The only exception (as alexhawker said) would be the M4800 and M6600 workstations. Those touchpads work extremely well, but those machines also sport the more "old school" touchpad design with separate a touchpad/button layout.

As I said, I am holding out hope that a M3800 refresh will improve on this issue, but I am not confident.

 

Maybe it has to do with the fact that Apple has a patent on its trackpad (I believe).

 

I actually have only one issue with the Dell clickpad. It frequently falsely identifies a tap-click when I move my finger across the pad. Not when I pick my fingers up just sliding over an area. So if I want to move the pointer as I type this it might highlight a few words as I move the pointer over them. I have no idea why since tap to click is not a new feature (I've had it at least since my M20) and this is the only laptop I've had this issue. Other than that I find this click pad (under Win8.1) worked every bit as well as my wife's two Macs (first gen 14" MBA, current 13" MBP). If I get rid of the tap to click (which is off by default on the Macs) then it works every bit as well. It's just that I really don't like mouse buttons that take any effort to push.

Ultimately dedicated buttons are better and especially with Solidworks I really miss the 3rd button that my M4400 had. Trackpads and CAD suck but the lack of a middle button makes them all but impossible.

I've gone back and forth with Win 7 and 8 on this machine. For me 8 worked better as soon as I added Classic Shell and another patch which restored the aero interface. MS clearly improved the accuracy of touch commands and I think the track pad drivers were a bit better as well. I never had two finger click or gesture issues with Win8 but 7 isn't 100%.

One of my other computers is an HP DM1z. It has a click pad that I hate. The problem is, unlike Apple and our M3800's it does not accept a click unless your fingers are in the designated area. To make maters worse it gets very unhappy if you try to do the old school thumb on the "buttons" and finger on the track pad (how I used all my trackpads with buttons). The slightest movement of your thumb triggers a multi-touch gesture. I'm happy this is not true of the M3800.