Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

thx crane,
so it is glossy, but is it workable in an office environment? TL lights?

(the reason i ask is cause i hate having to cope with bad reflections AND cause the covet edition is cheaper than a non covet one with the same options)
thx!
marc

hi Bokeh,

so it is glossy, but is it workable in an office environment? TL lights?
thx,
marc

 

Could Secure Boot be causing the slow boot time? If you have it switched ON, you could try switching Secure Boot OFF or even use Legacy Boot instead and see if the boot time improves.

If not, start a support case with Dell Technical Support.

No need to double post your question. I'm sure Bokeh reads questions addressed to Krane as well.

 

sorry for that

 

I am using UEFI without Secure Boot. I have Legacy BIOS support enabled, although as I now have only Windows 8 installed I do not need legacy support. Unfortunately if I try to remove legacy support booting the machine leaves me with a black screen and no boot. That has nothing at all to do with the CF card reader. The solution is to remove the CMOS backup battery in order to reset the BIOS and then start over. This is a known bug which has been reported and the workaround announced before I got my own machine.

It does seem that if I don't use Management Console functions then there is no visible problem under Windows, but if I start diskmgmt.msc it will take over two minutes for the virtual disk service to connect. If I start Performance Monitor it takes a while for that to spring to life. If I run Resource Monitor I see periodic gaps in the graphs produced. However, if I just use normal application software everything seems to proceed as normal. When it comes to (re)booting, with fast boot enabled the problem boot problem does not manifest itself when "booting" (resuming) the machine. It is only on a restart, which goes back to square one, which suffers the lengthy boot delay.

Here is a screen print showing the periodic disappearing data in the graphs from Resource Monitor. Also note that mmc.exe is reported as unresponsive. These problems vanish if I add a CF card to the reader or remove the reader altogether.



I think I can probably live with the small incovenience if it doesn't impact regular daily activities, which by and large it looks like it will not, but it is clearly some sort of defect and I'd like to get it ironed out if I can. I will contact Dell.

 

You can't switch between UEFI and legacy boot on the fly... UEFI expects a drive with a GPT partition table and legacy expects a drive with the old MBR-style partition table. Windows chooses which partition table layout to create at installation time based on which method you used to boot the installation media. So once you have a UEFI install on a GPT-partitioned disk, you are stuck with it.

 

Fixed it by merging the posts. Don't worry about it, but in the future you can use the edit button in those kind of situations for adding info to your post shortly after making it. On a side note, we were supposed to have a double post auto merging feature when we updates to vB4.2, but it hasn't been implemented yet. Not only would that make double posts a thing of the past, it would also keep the latest time stamp on the post making sure the thread stays on the first page.

Seriously, what is with people touching the screen to point at something. It's not your notebook, don't touch the screen sheesh. Undergrad students are the same (in my experience, a lot of students don't handle their notebooks with care).

 

Thanks to Bokeh for your amazing review...
i was trying to decide between mbpro 15" retina vs m6700 but decided to go m6700covet...

soon to be joining the 6700 owners club... yipee!

oh, yea, also ordered the 2913 monitor as well...
probably the biggest monitor i've ever owned... lol!

quick question:
CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (2 x 8G) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Laptop Memory Model CMSX16GX3M2A1600C10

are compatible with the m6700?

 

Those are the ones I am using (though I bought them individually, not in pairs). 4x8GB for 32 GB of memory total, about four months now with zero issues.

 

thanks for the quick reply Aaron!
can't wait to get my new laptop...

 

Driver update:

New release of Intel Rapid Storage drivers. 11.7.0
http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?ProductID=2101&DwnldID=22194&lang=eng&iid=dc_rss