M4800 Owner's Thread

Dose Dell Wireless 1601 support Miracast (WiDi)?

 

Nice, glad you are liking yours. 2 questions, with your screen, are you getting any backlight bleed from the top and bottom? The one I have seen looks pretty bad at boot. Also, how much battery life are you getting right now?

 

For those who asked, the machine came with a Win 8 (not 8.1) DVD, and Win 7 installed.

Changt34x, no discernibale backlight bleed for me when I just restarted. Battery life wise, I don't think I've gotten it below 40% yet, and not while using it for anything more than some web browsing and e-mail, but I can try and report back in a week or so and let people know. My last machine's battery was at the end-of-life 30 minutes of battery stage, so I have been pretty impressed so far.

 

Bummer the Win 7 disc is not included.

 

One other note, the webcam in the bezel is very underwhelming. I don't use skype/etc. very often, but if I did it might bother me. It's possible the high res screen makes the image look grainier, but I suspect it's just not a great sensor.

 

OK, I've now had my new m4800 for about 8 hours, so it's time for some first impressions...

#1: The front left corner is murdering my left arm. Literally, the pointy part is digging right into it, about an inch towards my elbow from my wrist.

#2: The keyboard is pretty good, but I wish the keycaps were made of velvety soft-touch plastic instead of regular hard plastic. They get partial credit for roughing up the surface of the keycaps a little, but I wish they were a little rougher or grippy.

#3: Lenovo Trackpoint nubs won't work. Lenovo's shaft is square, but it's about 30-50% larger than Dell's, and a Thinkpad nub just kinds of flops around. The stock nub sucks. I know why they made it that way (to make it completely non-interfering for people who don't like Trackpoint-type controllers), but Dell needs to pony up the extra 6 cents or so and ship the m48000 with two nubs... the default low-profile one, and a second, high-profile one for people who bought a Precision BECAUSE it was one of the few laptops with a pointer stick.

#4. Did I mention that the front left corner is really digging into my arm?

#5. The FHD screen is beautiful. I was worried that it might be dim and disappoint me the way my Thinkpad T61's 1600x900 screen did. I worried in vain. The m4800's FHD screen rocks.

#6. I seriously feel like Dell designed the Trackpoint buttons backwards. What were they thinking when they decided to have you press the low part instead of the high part?

#7. The volume buttons have no visual feedback whatsoever under Windows 7.

#8. Good god, it weighs a ton. OK, upon further reflection, it's no worse than a T61 or a 17" Macbook, but even *I* wasn't *quite* mentally prepared for its heft. This is a minor quibble, and I'm only mentioning it just because I *was* kind of shocked by the weight when I pulled it from the box.

#9. The power supply is gigantic. Huge. Mind-blowing. I'm surprised TSA hasn't banned it from aircraft as a potential weapon, because you could probably crack somebody's skull open by gripping the cord and swinging it like a mace.

#10. Nice, solid construction, and this is probably the first time in history I've bought a laptop and didn't feel compelled to instantly nuke everything on the hard drive and reinstall Windows before proceeding further.

 

Nice comments. Totally agree, even I was shocked by how heavy it is (can't trust that 6.35lb weight online), and I still walk with a work 17" MBP every day for .8 miles each way at least. Power adaptor is huge, but at least its not as huge as the one that comes with the E Port Plus dock. With the size of the power brick and my soon-to-be Zero Lemon 10000 mAH battery for the Note 3, I don't even want to think what the TSA is going to do to me this winter (never had good luck with them anyway). I also didn't like the left front corner, but I guess I am desensitized after using a MBP and original plastic MB (even worse) for so long.

Sorry but I have to ask, which GPU do you have? And is Optimus/Enduro actually working for you? Haven't heard yet from anyone with any configuration of the M4800 with working graphics switching.

 

Yeah, I know there's really nothing I can do about the front corner now, but I almost think the m4800 would have been better *without* the numeric keypad. Instead, they could have formed an uppercase "I" along the right edge like:

Home End
PgUp
PgDn
up
left dn right

and shifted the main part of the keyboard about an inch to the right.. possibly making the case about 1 or 2 mm deeper to give them enough room to roll or bevel the front edge slightly and blunt it a bit.


I got the Quadro 1100. I wouldn't have minded the 2100, but it wasn't available as an option.Hopefully, when/if I start to feel limited by the 1100, I'll be able to snag a better one harvested from a broken m4800 for $50-100 on eBay. I was afraid to get the qHD+ panel, because I've never seen Windows be reliably non-dysfunctional with high-res high-DPI displays, and I didn't want to be condemned to "Window 8" (no "s") for proper high-dpi support.

I haven't tried Optimus yet, because I'm kind of a speed freak who keeps the computer in 'high performance' mode all the time.

 

Very good explanation of the first impression of the Precision m4800. But what about the noise of the machine? The previous model was affected by the problem of the fans running also when no wark is done. And now? what do you think about the fan noise of the new 4800?
And can someone update the problem of optimus switching in nvidia configuration?
Thanks

 

So far I think consensus is this computer is quiet unless under large load. Fans are generally inaudible with typical office use workloads.

Optimus just isn't there. No one at Dell knows what is going on or whether this is even a feature. I would check out the W540 on Monday first if it is important to you.

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