M6600 Owners Thread

When docked M6600 display is often internal or both internal and external.
What external keyboard key combo replicates the internal keyboard Fn + F8 to change display?

Thanks

PS. Yes I need to update my sig ...

 

So after only two months my M6600's 256Gb SSD has failed and as you could imagine i'm not too happy about it.

One would have thought that for the price of these things they should be almost indestructable. Alas they are only machines and as we all know machines do have a habit of breaking for no apparent reason.

I only hope now that pro-support comes through for me tomorrow with a new SSD. But with this happening and the two month wait for my order it will be unlikely i will ever buy anything from dell ever again.

 

What make of SSD was it?

Just curious so I can avoid that brand if they have more issues with that model.

 

Dell's support is usually good.

 

It was a 256Gb Samsung... Model:MZ-5PA2560/0D1

 

Well, since Samsung just released that drive a couple of months ago, I am not surprised to see some failures.

It is very unfortunate, and I am sorry you had that happen.

New product lines normally have some issue at the beginning. Look at the early WD 500 and 750 GB Black Scorpion drives, I have read about quite a few early ones crashing, but once production got straightened out, failure rates are dropping quickly.

Hopefully you didn't loose much data. I myself am looking at a Crucial M4 SSD from NewEgg for when I order my M6600 in a couple weeks. Hopefully I will have better news to report once I get it installed.

 

I've had a motherboard, CPU, GPU and Screen replacement since acquiring my machine. You're not doing so badly.

 

Just to recap on how my configuration is doing (hopefully this will be of interest to others - both those having some problems with their Precisions, and those only planning to order one).

Let's start with good news:

1. The M6600 (at least in the config as per my sig) is absolutely stable, super-fast, cool and hence very quiet.

2. Following priceless guidance from Bokeh, I have reconfigured Windows 7 in order to minimize both the space required on my 128GB mSSD drive, and its usage (especially writes) by Windows and apps. This will hopefully prevent quick performance degradation of this (relatively new technology) SSD unit. So what I did is:

- move the largish (I have 16GB RAM) swap file,as well as the TMP folders, to the RAID 0 I have as secondary drive D:\

- turn off the hibernate feature completely

The above 2 things alone increased the free space on the smallish, 128GB drive C:\ by as much as 30 GB! I also disabled the Superfetch service, indexing and a couple of other non-essential features that could cause writing to my C:\drive.

I'd like to thank Bokeh for his support in doing all the above!

3. I tested the eSATA port extensively, and must say it definitely IS working (even with SATA Operation set to RAID in BIOS). Everything I connected - from Dell's own e-Media optical drive enclosure, through a single Samsung HDD (using eSATA <-> SATA cable), through a cheap eSATA enclosure with an SSD drive - works perfectly. Worth mentioning is that eSATA works in 3GB/s mode and not in the older 1.5GBps mode as it does on the XPS L501x.

Now let's move to some not-so-good news:

1. Unfortunately, what still doesn't work on the eSATA port (and causes much headache) is my 2 drive WD Studio II enclosure, containing 4TB of data in RAID0 configuration - it looks like the missing Port Multiplier is the deal breaker here...

2. Using one of my external monitors hooked up through VGA, I'm witnessing an annoying picture corruption (shimmering) when the system warms up. It starts some half an our after switching on, is getting worse for the next 15 mins, then recedes during another 15 minss or so - and after 1-1.5 hours it stabilizes. I have no idea what to blame - the monitor, the laptop, or the docking station - what do you think?

That would be all for now; will keep this forum informed on developments.

Piotr

 

Can someone please post some gaming benchmarks (videogame fps, 3d mark) for the quadro 3000m?

I'm tempted to stop waiting for the m6600 IPS w/ firepro and just get the 1080p w/ quadro 3000m.

 

I'll run whatever you want. Which 3dmark?