Dell Precision M6700 Owner's Review

I just popped the battery and it turns out that I do have the long life 87Wh version. Here's my BIOS screen....



I have no idea what technological marvel makes my battery "long life", but I'd still feel happier if I could do more to extend it even further.

 

Your battery basically will have a 3-year warranty. If it happens to fail within the 3 years, you may be entitled for a replacement.

I believe the other batteries are only covered for 6 months or 1 year, I'm not too sure about that.

Here's what the Dell Battery Information application looks like for me:



I'm not sure, but maybe the Custom profile isn't configurable for me inside the Windows 7 OS, because I've password protected the BIOS settings on my computer.

I have to yet put my custom profile to the test, to see if it actually works.

 

Do you know if you have the 6-cell or 9-cell battery?

You can use hwinfo64 to check the battery's capacity. My 9-cell reports 99900 mWh as the designed capacity. The 6-cell will be lower.

[Edit] Nevermind I didn't see some of the posts above. Looks like this is already answered.

 

It turns out that I have the 87Wh long life battery.

 

Hmm... I've put it to the test, but it doesn't seem to work....

I let it go down to 88%, and when I plugged the power back in, it started charging.
Now that's disappointing...

HWiNFO64 says Charge Rate: 57287 mW (No clue what the Standard or ExpressCharge rates should be)
It's charging rather fast I must say.

 

Here is a comparison of Precision vs Alienware, feature for feature.

View attachment 17in workstations.zip

1. If you make the keyboard lights white, then it is fine. Plus, who's going to be looking at your laptop when they should be looking at your preso?
2. False, it does have VGA. All you have to do is search for NBR's review.
3. True
4. False, monitor support depends on the integrated graphics chip, which depends on the Intel CPU series (3600/3700/3800) you order. Both Dell lines offer the same lines of CPUs, therefore, they both have the same amount of monitor support: 3

Both Dell lines are neck and neck. I've seen teardown videos of both machines and it even looks like they share the same motherboard. Nvidia's consumer grade graphics are still faster than their CAD/pro grade graphics. I've heard that you can get CAD/professional drivers for Nvidia's consumer/gaming graphics cards and swap in a GTX 680M into a M6700 without issues. It's going to be faster than the K5000 top of the line graphics card available on the M6700.

http://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Graphics-Cards-Benchmark-List.844.0.html

 

Anyone has the Covet M6700? How is the glossy screen IPS? Considering indoor usage, will there be difference in contrast ratio between the glossy glass and anti-glare normal screen? I have a quote from Dell so can order the Covet version. Is Covet suppose to be expensive than standard M6700 assuming both have same spec?

 

Wow...thanks for all the info. I upgraded my wife's Latitude to Win 8 Pro for $14.99 (Microsoft's Special Upgrade Offer). First I upgraded over Win 7, but then realized it is a waste to have the Dell's recovery partition now, so I popped in the Win 8 Pro bootable flash drive that I made, deleted all partitions and did a fresh install.

After I did the fresh install of Win 8 pro, I got a message that said it can't activate Windows and that this license key is an upgrade only one. So I was forced to put Win 7 in first then Win 8 on top of it.

I did find a way to do the clean install and activate Win 8 pro with the $14.99 upgrade license.

Do the following and reboot. Windows 8 Pro will be legally and successfully activated.

 

The installation needs to see that you have an existing install so that it can "upgrade", even if you plan a wipe and clean install. As daft as it may appear, you can actually do a clean Win 8 install onto a clean drive, which will not activate, but you can then repeat the Win 8 install again and this time it will see the prior (unactivated) Win 8 installation and consider that sufficient proof to allow the "upgrade" installation to continue to activation.

In other words you did not need to re-install Win 7. You could have just run the Win 8 installation a second time over the installation you had just made.

A bit late for you, but maybe useful to others.

 

In my experience, you can't rely on the accuracy of Window's estimated time remaining calculation. For me, it tends to grossly over-exaggerate time remaining.

BTW, I wiped out my hard drive and upgraded to Windows 8, does anyone know where we can download Dell's power plan?

For my personal testing, I just wait until the battery shows 100% and then unplug it and run a stopwatch app on my phone. When the laptop automatically goes into sleep mode, I check the time on my phone. I'm usually at 40% brightness.

It would be nice to be able to shutdown the optical drive. I've thought about removing it altogether to make the laptop lighter and since I almost never use it.