M6600 Owners Thread

Only two HDD makers make a 750GB HDD 7200 RPM: Seagate and Western Digital. My money on that Dell is using Seagates.

 

Can you please tell me where to find this fingerprint driver? because I'm in the same case.

Thank you

 

That was verry good idea as well. I simply googled M6600 keyboard images, circled the "backlit" symbol in red and asked my helpers to check for it on the machine. Also told them how to trigger it on. Thanks very much again.

 

I've just reinstalled DELL control Point just to get the additional power management plans.

Not pleased to see it was the same kind of ugly and buggy software i've installed and then removed from my M6400 3 years ago.

However i've got the "extended battery life" plan tested.
All in all it's not much better than default Windows 7 "Power saver" plan, 6h57m. autonomy vs. 6h45m. (both @98.5% battery).

Here is an excerpt of my M6600 sensors data, for anybody being interested.
CPU is i7 2720QM, GPU is Nvidia Quadro 4000M.

 

Side to side 2 "traditional" HDs performance comparison:

LEFT: TOSHIBA 500GB MK5061GSY (Stock DELL M6600 500Gb drive)
RIGHT: WESTERN DIGITAL SCORPIO BLACK 750GB WD7500BPKT (bought in aftermarket)



As you can see The bigger Scorpio is rawly 30-50% faster in average for both read and write.
It's very cheap too, i paid around €80 for it.
Finally, judging from here: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1310/6/ ,
looks like its performance is quite comparable to a hybrid disk such as the Seagate Momentus XT (which should theoretically be way faster).

 

The other important thing to do make sure your install and services are tweaked. I still hit the Black Viper site every time I create a new image for one of my machines to make sure I am up to date on what can be safely disabled or removed.

Also - HOLY CRAP! - 7 hours on a 17" workstation! Yes, I know Macbook Pros can get about the same battery life, but they are not as powerful and flexible as the M6600.

 

Yes, i know Black Viper tips. I already disabled many services, avoided reinstalling "uselessware" (included some DELL stuff), tuned antivirus modules, limited windows indexing and stopped fancy startup processes via msconfig.

7 hours is theoretical battery life. For "everyday usage" i normally don't go much past 5 hours, which still is a remarkable performance though.

 

Does anyone know how to make the fingerprint work??

 

I'm tossing up between these two drives as my second drive. Similar performance, but one has more capacity (750gb Scorpio Black), the other, lower power consumption.

Speaking of power, can someone tell me if the m6600 has a 2 pin or three pin mains plug (currently looking around for a Aust. adapter)

 

Did you try this:
Drivers and Downloads