M4800 Owner's Thread

Since seeing the first Precision laptop in it's current design I've been rather fond of this series. Never owned one though, since it's not a particularly cheap piece of equipment.

Before ordering I have spent weeks reading up on and looking at the M3800, M4800, M6800, Thinkpad W540 and the macbook pro series. In the end I feel that the M4800 offers decent mobility and hopefully great performance while giving me the option to do hardware maintenance myself if needed not to mention that it looks great .

Happy to say I ordered one last friday.

M4800 with the i7 4800MQ CPU, 32GB RAM, FHD screen, K2100 GPU with a Dell Wireless 5570 card and the cheapest HDD option.

The swedish store didn't have a "build your own" option even though neighboring country do. Seems like Dell just did not put it up as it was accessible by modifying some url parameters to force it to the swedish version.

Surprisingly, upgrading to 32GB was cheaper in the Dell store than buying extra sticks locally, at least from the stores I usually get my hardware from. A first time for everything I suppose.

Really looking forward to receiving this. Currently it's saying 8th of August but I am keeping my fingers crossed for an earlier delivery. As soon as it arrives I will be replacing the HDD with a new Samsung 850 Pro 1TB drive and perhaps the lcd screen if it displays issues similar to described in this thread.

I am hoping to consolidate my current setup of about 5 different PCs in various shapes and sizes into one M4800 and use VMs where I need them.

The only remaining issue is finding a backpack that can fit the substantial buttocks of this laptop. I ordered a Crumpler Muli Backpack L for it which claims to have a laptop compartment large enough but only time will tell.

PS:
Are there still any known issues with this laptop I should look out for?

 

I suspect that it is like the M4700 - and so will need both a new panel, and a different LVDS cable.

See this post by Davep.

 

Good luck finding the needed LVDS cable - part # 6G4XC. A buddy of mine bought a 4800 on ebay and wants to upgrade to the 1080P screen. This will require a LVDS upgrade and the part is different from the m4700. According to Dell (spoke to 2 reps and online chat) , this part is no longer in stock....

 

Lol one more weird problem.
I sat at my Desk this morning and my computer was turned off. I do not turn my computer off so I suspected a power failure and turned it back on.
It went on system resume...I said ok go ahead. Boots in to windows and it tells me it shut itself down due to critical battery levels.
However in the meantime, the laptop was docked and power cable was connected, the power icon was showing 0% battery and not charging meanwhile clicking on the icon would produce a popup window showing %100 battery.

I ended up restarting the computer and the battery charging icon came back to its senses and charged the laptop...is this a big deal? No it is not, except I ended up doing a 15 minute desktop setup after restarting the computer. However it shows the crappy nature of Dells hardware matching ability and Microsofts software just being the rotten cherry on top.

I am so glad Dell is taking this piece of crap back tomorrow morning....

 

Thanks for the information, guys. I guess I'll avoid upgrading my screen then and just use the 768p screen when I'm not at home.

 

Just recently my BIOS boot screen (Dell Logo) boots through very slowly then Windows loads. Almost one minute. I also updated to A09 BIOS and same issue. I have "Minimal" set for preliminary diagnostic check. Does anyone else experience a slow boot during the BIOS load?

 

I think someone else ran into this and chased it down to connected external drives or USB devices being polled on startup. Do you have anything attached?


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

Yes, several

1. it rocks.

2. it's turned it's self off if i've picked it up by the corner, i stopped doing that

3. suspend problems, then again i have linux, and theres allways something

4. it rocks

 

Does anyone know if you can upgrade from a dual core to a quad core CPU on the M4800? I know previous generations of the precision had different motherboards that prevented this upgrade if you originally had a dual core.

 

Great question; I'd like to know the answer to this as well.