Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

Oh Thanks Aaron!
I lost your previous post...that sounds good! I will try
but with the fan in "quiet mode", will I have a reduced cpu performance?

anyway the fan annoying problem I see it's not only mine...

ciao!

 

My observation is that the CPU will still clock up into turbo mode and remain there for a long time. (This will still kick up the fan.) I haven't done any sort of benchmark to measure performance concretely.

However, I have noticed reduced performance with both the CPU and GPU under load, and I switch to the "High performance" plan in this case.

 

Hi guys!
Precision m6700 arrived

 

How has the stability of Windows 8 been running the Precision so far? I ordered my 6700 with W7, but should I initialize it as is or just skip ahead and update directly to W8? What components would I have to go without?

Also, what method did anyone use that transferred programs use to get them to their new unit? Was it as effective as you would have liked? How did you set up the OS? Partitions? I have a 256 SSD main drive plus a 240 mSATA and finally a 1TB HDD

 

I got both OS on mine and while I haven't used 8 for more than light office work, it has been perfectly stable so far. The only thing not working with windows 8 was the fingerprint reader and from what I can tell looking at the recent posts in both M6700 threads, it seems to have been fixed.

 

That's great to hear tijo. I'd much rather go ahead and install W8 now and be done with it.

 

My M6700 came with Win 7 too. I set it up with Win 7 and then around a week or two later I pulled the drive and then upgraded to Win 8 with a new drive. I have been running Win 8 for the last week and I have no plans to go back to 7. At first I thought the new interface would bother me, but to me it is no big deal. Once I am on the desktop it is just like 7. I also have the fingerprint reader working and is pretty cool for logging into windows. that is all I am using it for. I am not sure if you can use it for anything else.

The drivers I installed include:

nVidia from nVidia site
PhysX from the nvidia site
Alps Touchpad from Dell Site (ALPS_MULTI-TOUCH-TOUCHPAD_V26GF_A02_SETUP_ZPE.exe)
Dell System Utilities from Dell Site (System-Utilities_Application_M5HX9_WN_2.2.1_A00.exe)
Control Vault from Dell Site (CV_Drv_Setup_8THGX_A10_64bit_ZPE.exe)
Freefall Sensor from Dell site (ST-MICRO_FFS-LNG3DM_A04_PD1NH_SETUP_ZPE.exe)
Audio Driver from Dell Site (IDT_92HD93-HD-AUDIO_PW8D6_A05_SETUP_ZPE.exe)
Intel Rapid Storage Technology Management Console and Driver from Dell site (version 11.6.0.1030, A01)

Since I installed these last week, I think there is a newer Alps driver than I list above.

before install, I changed the following in the Bios:

Changed Boot Sequence to UEFI
Under advance Boot disabled legacy support
Under secure boot enabled it.

Also, when I first got it, the SATA was set to RAID. After the win 7 setup, I changed it to AHCI and it booted fine into 7. I left it as AHCI since to include the install of 8.

One last thing, the the finger print reader / control vault, there is also a firmware update. I did this update under win 7. Aaron44126 noted on his win 8 (where he did not have the finger print working because there was no driver), he had to do the driver first because the system would not see the the device without the driver installed first (see post 1213).

Hope this helps.

Mike

 

I transferred my existing Windows 7 install from my previous machine to the M6700 using the in-place upgrade migration "trick".
Move a Windows install from one machine to another using in-place upgrade – aaron-kelley.net

This took a while but went over with no issues. All of my stuff moved. I had to install drivers and stuff but that is no problem.

Afterwards I did the Windows 8 upgrade. No trouble here either. Haven't had any major issues with Windows 8 as far as stability goes.

As for the driver situation on Windows 8, Dell has everything posted now but most stuff is either included with Windows 8 or available on Windows Update. The freefall sensor and fingerprint reader I think are the only things that you must get from Dell.

A clean install will probably get you a cleaner system but I simply do not have time to go about setting everything up from scratch again.

 

Thanks for the most useful information. Since my Precision will be my primary editing machine what I think I'll do is upgrade to W8 and just transfer my editing software since that all I really need for now.

So I should do the firmware update prior to the ungraded to W8? Anything else?

 

I did the control vault firmware update in win 7 before I went to 8. After the firmware update, I could not boot into 7. After the welcome screen, the screen was black with the white arrow. I could get to task manager and shutdown, but not to the desktop. I wound up doing a system restore to get it back and then installed the updated driver. Maybe try installing the updated driver first and then do the firmware upgrade.

The control vault firmware update may or may not have had anything to do with the issue. I assume it does because that is all I did at the time. Dell pro support did not think it did and thought it was something else. The system restore was to a couple days earlier.