Dell Precision M6700 Owners Thread

F2 for BIOS settings. It's been F2 on every Dell I've owned since I bought my first laptop in 1998. F12 gets you into temporary boot sequence override. No idea about the rest.

 

F2 for BIOS: When booting, as soon as you see the DELL logo on the screen, hold down F2 (or F12 for boot sequence)

F8 for save-mode options: This will need good timing, you will need to wait just until the end of the IRST screen (which is right before windows boots), you need to continuously keep tapping F8 as fast as you can, the save-mode option list should show up soon enough. If you don't get the list and start seeing the windows boot logo/animation, you didn't get the timing right and might need to try again.

 

Great advice of both of you, thanks,it works fine.

I wonder why they put the harddrive to the first place in the boot-sequence - should make more sense to put the CD-Rom there, no?

 

someone wrote that he used a 120 watt adapter and it worked - at least when he booted with the adapter plugged in; but I guess that was a normal power-net-adapter;

sure it's not an original dell-adapter, but on other dell-notebooks they also use non-dell adapters;

 

That can be set in the BIOS.
I suppose one reason to not put the optical drive or USB before the hard drive, is because it would otherwise delay the boot, making it check for all the devices connected or disks inserted into the optical drive, before continuing to the most likely used boot device.

But if required, you can always press F12 when the Dell logo starts showing at boot.

 

Mods let me know if this is not allowed.

In case anyone is interested in a well specced brand new M6700 Covet. I know this type of laptop is for a smaller group of people so I thought I would post it here. My needs have changed since I initially purchased the M6500 Covet and this was a laptop that was sent to me by Dell in replacement for the M6500 Covet that I had issues with for a while now.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/not...m6700-covet-mobile-precision-workstation.html

 

I thought it would get stucked once the HD-OS doesnt boot anymore, but probably it just tries the one next in the row, no?

 

True, but setting a different order to the optical bay or USB would usually be set for temporary reasons, like reinstalling the OS, for that the F12 key would do.
Setting a different order in BIOS is something you would do if you need that setting a little more permanent, like if you've got multiple drives with different operating systems.
Anyway, in the end it's personal preference.

 

um, I didn't suspect that I'd come up here with a serious problem, but now it's there. Had around two dozen windows open, mainly IE9, switched to XP-Classic-Design, and the screen became partly black. Switching back didn't solve it, neither did reboot; It's becoming partly black and then the blackness disappears and comes back again ...

thanks for input here ...

++++

update

made system recovery, and then it was fine again;

but then tried XP-classic-mode again, and the problem re-occured. There was a note of something with premier-colors poping up shortly; I have chosen SRGB-colors, not the full range;

a new system recovery made it fine again, but I'd really prefer XP-design; could it be that premiercolors doesn't support the old Design





If anyone has a hint about how to fixate brightness ... mine jumps back immeadiately to fully bright

+++ update, solved: A tip from Alex: brightness can be adjusted in PremierColor




Did you get a booklet in which things like these are explained? I only got a very thin sheet with the connection sockets.

 

I have a Dell M6700 Covet coming to replace my aging Thinkpad W520 (I wanted the larger screen)!

I am a software architect and I have a Samsung SSD 840 Pro that has several Virtual Box partitions on it. I use the drive as a swappable drive between my desktop computer and my Thinkpad W520. Swapping is very, very easy (NO TOOLS required)!

Everything I have seen about the Dell M6700 swappable drive options seems to imply you have to:

1) Remove the battery
2) Remove two screws
3) Remove back cover
4) Remove MORE screws
5) Take out whichever drive you are "swapping"!

Can someone PLEASE tell me this isn't what Dell calls "swappable"?

Merry Christmas!

Shane