Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

Will the upcoming model of the M3800 still use mSATA SSD or is there going to be a transition to the M.2 form factor?

Regards

 

I have had this notebook for awhile now. I have the 500GmsataSSD, 16G ram, 91W battery, and 4K screen.. I am an animator/compositor and this is my main computer I use for avg 6 hours a day..

Likes: I LOVE the portability, CPU power, and battery life!

Dislikes:

I HATE the black rubber palmrest/keyboard underlay.

I also hate that because of the black rubber palmrest, the touchpad is now separate so there is an open seam that can trap dust/dirt.

I HATE that it doesn't have a numpad. I use PGUP/PGDN/Home/End CONSTANTLY in my programs. On my m6800 I could use those keys with my left hand while keeping my right hand on the trackball. Now that simple keystroke requires TWO KEYS, and not only that, it takes BOTH HANDS to press those two keys.. ARG, very annoying, it really slows down my workflow. I've tried using an external numpad, but it is not the same (a delay after keypress) plus it is another device to drag around. Many other notebooks this size have numpads, including ALL the other dell precision mobiles!

Lastly, at least at this point I do not like the HiDPI screen. Not all programs have updated to scale correctly so their UI icons are microscopic, some are even hidden or not visible. Very hard to work efficiently in that workspace.

Minor: I do not like chic-let keys. The m6800 had a great keyboard. I've gotten used to them, but I still prefer the older keyboard style better. But as I look at all the notebook computers available today, they are all chic-let keys..

 

^ If you want to do one-handed PGUP/PGDN/Home/End, see the link in my sig. I also found that very annoying.

 

With brightness very low, and very light usage, it might just... but in any realistic usage, no. With the 6 cell, and about a year's battery aging, I get about 3 1/2 hours in light real use. Was better when new, but not much over 4.

I think that's more a factor of it being a clickpad; the Latitudes have had the same rubber material for the palmrest since the E6x20 series, and I actually rather like it. The debris under the clickpad, not so much -- mine has finally failed; part is on its way on Tuesday.

Personally, I have no use for a numpad, and HATE the inevitable off-center keyboard that comes with them. That said, the lack of hard keys for page up/page down are a major annoyance, and home/end a moderate one -- there is PLENTY of space around the arrow keys to do what they did on the last couple of generations of Latitudes (and Lenovo does) and put a hard PgUp/PgDn in the shoulders around the inverted T -- for that matter, a slightly offset arrow keys to allow then to be closer to full size (as is done in the Latitudes) would have been very welcome. Slightly less space between keys on the F-key row would have gotten one more key in, and why they needed a dedicated key for PrtScrn I have no idea -- home/end as on the Latitudes would have been much more useful.

Yes, unfortunately. Chiclet/island style keyboards do vary, and both Lenovo's and the newest Latitudes are a bit better than this. Unfortunately, the M3800 is a dressed-up consumer machine with a "professional" GPU, and a lot of the little details suffer. I've been pretty happy with mine, but unless Dell fixes these issues, I'm unlikely to be getting the Broadwell/Skylake upgrade when I'm do for a new machine in ~9 months.

 

I actually find the M3800 keyboard feel to be excellent, one of the best I've ever used. My Thinkpad X120e isn't bad and the X220 we have at the office is quite good but for straight up feel the M3800 is one of the best laptop keyboards I've ever used. That said, the layout isn't the best. I prefer the layout of my old M20 and really hate the lack of page up/down, home and end keys.

BTW, there is nothing inherent in an island keyboard that should make it feel different than a standard keyboard so long as you aren't pushing between the keys. However, many island keyboard seem to have very shallow dishing on the keys. That makes some feel different. However, half of the time it's a style thing (a style I don't care for). The other half of the time, as is the case with the M3800, it's a mechanically more efficient way to package the keyboard.

 

If you want to do one-handed PGUP/PGDN/Home/End, see the link in my sig. I also found that very annoying.

I love you

 

For all of you who (like me) don't like the two-handed Fn+Arrow key design there is a pretty good fix using AutoHotKey that makes the Right Shift work like Fn with the Arrow keys.

My setup uses this in an RShift.ahk file:

Code:

; Right-shift PgUp/Dn & Home/End hotkeys
>+Up::send {RShift Up}{PgUp}
>+Down::send {RShift Up}{PgDn}
>+Left::send {RShift Up}{Home}
>+Right::send {RShift Up}{End}
^>+Left::send {RShift Up}^{Home}
^>+Right::send {RShift Up}^{End}

 

What does your last two lines of code do?

There are times I need to shift-home, shift-pgup, shift-pgdown, shift-end..
But when I use Left Shift with RightShift(as Fn)+Up(as PgUp), it does not recognize the left shift..
Possible?

 

Last 2 lines make Ctrl+RShift+LeftArrow give the same as Ctrl+Home (top of page) and similarly for Ctrl+End. That is a bit hard to do with the right hand alone but possible! For combining those with Shift for selection I think you need to probably use Fn+LShift and leave the RShift out of it, or else [homework] figure out the AutoHotKey spec to make that work. I figure if you have to use the left hand then the hotkey stuff is not really advantageous anyway. Hope that helps.

 

I just got my new M3800, and I have been having issues with USB devices. Some just work, others worked after I replaced the cable, and one in particular, a USB microphone, refuses to recognize. All this hardware works fine on my older M6700.

In a chat with Dell tech support, they had me re-install the chipset drivers, which did not help. There conclusion was that as long as one USB device works, then it is not the computer's fault. If you didn't buy the USB device from Dell, there is nothing else they can do. Have a nice day. Elsewhere.

I have to believe that either the computer or the device (or both) are operating dangerously close to the limits of the specification.

Given that I have tested the microphone on 7 different computers, and the only one it does not work on is the M3800, and also given what I had to go through to get my iPhone 6 to reliably connect to the M3800, I believe the problem is fixable on the computer side.

To get the iPhone working, I turned off USB Selective Suspend and tried different cables till I found one that worked.

Any suggestions as to what else I might try? How do I convince Dell to look into this?