Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

I looked a little more into the topic of customization of the Mobility center, and this does seem interesting. If I check in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\MobilePC\MobilityCenter\Tiles, I can see a whole bunch of interesting tiles (ALS, BacklightKB, Bluetooth, ColorEg, DesktopMode, FnKeys, HotKeys, LongevityMode, Security, TouchPad, UserButton, WiFiSwitch). Clearly, only a few of these are active (you can only have a total of eight tiles in addition to the default ones provided by Windows).

What is strange is that on my system, in HKLM\Dell Computer Corporation\Quickset\SelectedFeatures (which I assume governs what tiles are actually used), I have listed BacklitKeyboard, Backlitkeyboard_Support, ExBattLife, and WiFiLocRadioCtrl, which does not correspond to the names above, and which also does not correspond to the tiles I see. I must be missing something here.

Nevertheless, bottom line seems to be that Dell somehow messed up the tile configuration for Mobility Center, at least regarding what happens in Windows 7. Well, at least on my system...

 

Your mobility center should look like this after installing the latest 10.16.12 version from Jan 28 last month:



If you click the circled Keyboard icon, you'll see this:



I can confirm without a shadow of a doubt that it works... and it works well. You may need to experiment though. For instance, if you turn off the kb backlight completely off, QuickSet I think assumes you want it off all the time. So, based on my experiments, turn on the backlight in a very dimly lit room, and set it to the level you want (High or Medium). Then just leave it alone. It takes a while for QuickSet to gather light level info I think.

Like I said, it is not as accurate as a MacBook. A MacBook will turn off the kb light in a moderately bright room, while the m3800 might keep it on.
But, otherwise, it works pretty darn well and I am pleasantly surprised to find this new feature after having the notebook for 8 months.

 

At least on my Windows 7 system, it doesn't. I have an additional WiFi icon in the top row (so I have a total of 8 icons in the top two rows), but my bottom row looks like the one I have shown in my link above. If I manually run BacklitKB.exe in C:\Program Files\Dell\Quickset I get exactly the "Keyboard Backlighting" window you show.
I'm not sure the ambient light control for the keyboard would work, since I have the ambient light sensor disabled in Control Panel. If I have it on there, the machine tries to adapt the screen brightness as well, which is unusable since the adjustment has only a small number of levels. On a day that has mixed sun and clouds, the constant changes in screen brightness would drive me crazy...

 

It could be that Windows 7 lacks the ability to interface with the light sensor. This is certainly a possibility.

 

No, it does read the light sensor, and interacts with it in exactly the same way as Windows 8.x I can turn on the backlight sensor and set the keyboard backlight to depend on it, too, and it works the same way as in Win8. The only thing that is different is the selection of tiles in Mobility Center.

That's not really a big deal at all, but I'm curious now, and I'm interested in whether there's a way to customize what appears in Mobility Center myself, perhaps with some Registry edits.

 

Well at least on the XPS 15, the wireless switch is shared with the Print Screen key, and I think in the BIOS you can customize which radios are toggled by that switch. But Widcomm Bluetooth stack? Are you sure those are the appropriate drivers for the Bluetooth chipset on this system? On the XPS 15, BT is provided by the Intel 7260 WiFi+BT card and therefore Intel's Bluetooth drivers are required, so unless that has changed on the new M3800, that's why the installer can't find a suitable Bluetooth adapter.

Those remaining devices are probably related to the Intel chipset, Management Engine, and Dynamic Platform and Thermal Framework. Try installing those if you haven't already; you can find them on the XPS 15 page since apparently the M3800 driver page has been having issues lately. If you're still stuck, go into the Properties for each device, go over to Details, and find the dropdown that shows the PCI Vendor and Device IDs. Google those and you might get a hit that points you in the right direction.

At least on Win 8.x, you can disable adaptive display brightness in Power Options > Advanced, which would allow you to re-enable the ALS without that unwanted effect. You may have to have the ALS actually enabled (and possibly reboot the system) before adaptive brightness shows up in Power Options, though. I think it hides that option if it doesn't see a way to actually measure ambient light.

 

Sure. After a bit of searching I found this thread below. You have to do everything listed under the green checked answer, including the stuff in the grey box at the bottom of that post. It's ridiculous that we have to go through all of that, but it worked for me and I was able to install the latest generic Synaptics drivers from their website, which are an improvement for sure. Still not quite Apple-like, but definitely an improvement.

http://superuser.com/questions/690671/synaptics-windows-8-1-updating-synaptics-failed

 

Thanks for the tip. Yeah, I had all of those installed already. It ended up being a bunch of drivers that weren't listed on the Dell m3800 driver page. I searched for the hardware IDs like you suggested and I was able to hunt and peck for the remaining drivers that I needed.

Thanks again for your help!

 

Hey guys I have another quick question about the touchpad. Do you guys still get the pointer jumping to another spot on the screen for no reason at all sometimes? I feel like I have played with almost every setting combination possible and I still have this happening to me.

Is this just one of those issues that I am going to have to learn to deal with, or is there something that I may be missing?

Thanks.

 

couple of ideas spring to mind. The obvious being "automatically move pointer to the default button..." setting in the mouse properties, but you've probably already looked at that.

The second being a problem with the touch screen: Wherever you touch the screen, the pointer will start from that position when you move the mouse. So if there's a bug with the touchscreen, that could cause the problem you're describing.