Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Could someone PLEASE dump the K1100M vBIOS with GPU-Z and PM me?!

Thanks a ton!

 

I have K1100M in the M4800... Would that be equally helpful?

 

It's possible they have more than one vendor. I've seen this on other Dell products where the key from one vendor does not fit the keyboard from another. I think a total keyboard replacement is the answer here.

 

Yes sir!

 

Hey All:

I am thinking about getting a M3800, and want to know if it will accept a 2 TB 2.5" sata drive. I want to order it with a 256 GB SSD mini card, and would like to have a 2 TB drive for data storage, but they only offer it with the 1 TB drive. Just wondering if I can just order it without the second drive, and buy a 2 TB elsewhere and through it in. I see they offer the 2 TB secondary drive in the M4800 series, so I'm afraid that the M3800 won't work with a 2 TB drive..

 

I believe 2TB 2.5" drives are somewhat thicker than standard and so probably won't fit into the M3800. With the 61WHr battery that you get if you have the 2.5" bay the battery life of this laptop is tragic, so bear that in mind if you order. I actually have a smaller capacity battery and harddisk bracket kicking around because I upgraded my first M3800.

Today a 2015 version has arrived on my desk with the 4K screen and it is worth noting that this version loses one of the USB3 ports on the left hand side of the machine, reducing it to 2 x USB3 and 1 x USB2. Bit of a pain!

 

They sell 2.5

They sell 2TB drives at the standard thickness now (9mm?) but there are still lots of thick ones out there (12mm). Careful when/if you make your purchase.

 

thanks guys. So the 61WHr battery doesn't get the advertised 6 hours? I have an old XPS 13 that also has a quad/ded graphics and the battery lasted about an hour new, and it stinks not having any run time. Size/weight and run time are all pretty important to me, as is capacity. What's the difference in 'real' run times between the 61 and the 91 batteries? I guess this may be the most important determining factor for me to go M3800 or M4800. I don't think I can swing the price of a M3800 with a 1 TB mini so I can get the 91 battery. Heck I'm not sure I could even deal with 1 TB...

 

At the beginning I had my doubts on the 500GB SSD for this very reason, especially considering multiple SOs, VMs, etc.

Even though my original idea was to eventually buy the 1TB SSD, what I have finally done is to change my habits. Particularly, the things I didn't really needed in the computer at all the times, move them to an external hard drive (in my case, connected to the router -Netgear R7000- and shared as a network drive).

That might or might not be a solution for you, depending if you need to access that data while not at home/office, whether you can access that network drive via Internet/cloud, and the required speed/latency for accessing those files (access/transfers are much slower, even with USB 3.0 + wifi ac).

 

The M3800 can take a single mSATA SSD and a single 2.5" 7mm drive if configured with the 61Whr battery. Most, if not all, 2TB drives are 9.5mm and will not fit.