Dell Precision M3800 Owner's Review

No, there is no difference in the way Win8.x does "that DPI stuff". None.

 

I saw this one. I just cant imagine dell is releasing premium notebooks in that price segment with such horrible faults...

 

sorry for my jovial expression.

i meant "that DPI stuff" when working with multiple monitors. (in my case a 27"monitor with 2560x1440)

win7 applies the dpi scaling for all monitors (thus i have to switch resolution to 1920x1200 with 100dpi on my rMBP or the icons/fonts will become huge on my 27" monitor), while afaik in win 8.x you can adjust different dpi for different monitors.

because of that i was curious about the behaviior of m3800/XPS when switching to 1920x1080 (100%dpi), because my rMBP looks really blurry with this setting.

 

As I understand it from other research, the old model had a problem with the design of the placement of the antenna in the lid and the aluminium some how degrading the signal. As the lid on this new version is essentially the same, the potential for the problem is of course still there. I would have hoped though that with all the problems openly available in discussion on the net that Dell engineering would have found a solution for the new models. I still hope that our experience is an isolated one and that others have better performance experience. Would like to hear how anyone else gets on with the same kind of test.

 

Some people on the XPS 15 thread (but not everyone) have seen issues with throughput dropoff and connectivity drops, but all of the affected parties reported that both of those issues are completely fixed by updating to a newer driver available on Intel's site compared to what the Dell site has -- and there was an even newer version posted yesterday.

 

It's true that metal interferes with radio waves, which is why back when there was a plastic MacBook and an aluminum MacBook Pro, the plastic unit got much better WiFi range. But judging by the number of all-aluminum notebooks now, it seems people have engineered around the problem, either by having the antennas transmit through a tiny non-metal window on the chassis or by WiFi cards being strong enough that the reduced range isn't an issue. But nobody has been complaining about range that I've seen (and I've read this entire thread and the XPS 15 thread); the only issues have been around bandwidth and sudden dropoffs, but a simple driver update from Intel has resolved that for everyone who's experienced it.

 

I am very interested in the 17% discount you mentioned. Currently I have a 10% Employee Purchase Programme discount. It would be nice to have a 17% discount for XPS 15. Can you tell me more about it?

 

Not much to tell, really. I believe that different companies get different levels of employee discounts depending on a variety of factors, probably primarily how much business the company does with Dell. Years ago when I worked in the IT department of an educational institution I worked through our Dell rep to purchase a Precision M90 for myself and got a quote that had a 35% discount (we didn't have a formal employee purchase program or Web portal.) Considering the retail spec of that system was about $5250, that saved me a huge bit of cash. But at the time that was the only 17" machine available with a Blu-ray burner.

 

This is not my experience. We did update Intel drivers with zero improvement. If you widen your references to YouTube and other forums you will see that this is a huge problem. I guess one of the reasons I am banging the drum on this, is that I expect better or comparable performance to my old Vaio. 6 times less download speed is just not acceptable to me.

To back up my point.... http://reviews.dell.com/2341n/xps-15-l521x/dell-xps-15-l521x-reviews/reviews.htm?sort=rating&dir=asc

 

That link pertains to the old XPS 15 chassis, which has a different design and completely different wireless chipset, in fact it's not even an Intel chipset! Hardly a reasonable comparison point. And I can't really see how this could be construed as a "huge problem" given that the system just recently shipped and there aren't many owners out there. Pretty much everything I've seen has indicated that driver updates solve the problem, and as I said a driver was released yesterday that seems to have improved speeds even further. I see you received an M3800 and had bad experience with it, but that and one YouTube video doesn't make it a "huge problem", and you also returned it before Intel released their newest drivers. You also didn't describe what if any troubleshooting you attempted (access point/router firmware update, changing channels, trying 2.4 vs 5 GHz, etc).