M6600 Owners Thread

I do have a similar problem but it's not a bright flash, instead the screen disappears for a 10th of a second...

I really think that we shouldn't be asking ourselves whether it's a driver or a hardware issue. We paid a premium price for this laptop and within 2 weeks I have had more issues than with my Vaio SR29 in two years and a half!

This is unacceptable! I don't know about you guys but I'm using this laptop only for work, each time I spend an hour trying to figure out what the problem is I loose money!!

 

I just ran one full pass on Memtest and that's fine. I also ran the Dell diagnostics and it found nothing.

 

Run HWinfo32 or 64. Check the wattage being pulled.

The slight flicker is probably Optimus changing video cards as you surf sites with video streaming ads. Anandtech.com always has those kinds of ads.

 

I also have the brightness problem. It keeps shifting from high to low and back to high... Also my fingerprint reader gets more misreads than I expected. It is the swipe reader and it takes anywhere from 20-30 swipes for it to recognize... Especially from sleep and hibernate. Anyone else having these issues?

 

The brightness problems it could be due to power saving profiles. the laptop dims it display if not used for a minute or two (set according to the profile).

As for the fingerprint reader, it seems mine's not too accurate as well.

 

Anyone please?

I'm using my M6600 stationary 90% of the time, and am afraid my battery will not last very long if it's being constantly charged...

 

I use my M4400 in a dock 90% of the time. Over the last few years I've never had a problem with battery life when I need to use it.

I suppose if you are concerned you could always remove the battery.

 

I'm having similar problems - occasional restarts, and no Intel graphics present after them. The only way to get it back is restart again, enter the "front-side" of the BIOS (is there a way to get into the real thing?!!), and tick the checkbox for Optimus... Why and how it turns off in the BIOS beats me, and frankly - if Optimus can disengage all by itself - I don't feel very confident about other, more vital things, either. Like for example: the "SATA Operation" mode might change from RAID to AHCI, and my 2x 750GB RAID is lost!

Speaking of AHCI vs. RAID setting, I mentioned before that my eSATA port is dead with RAID inside. But it turns out it's not quite dead - Dell Poland sent me a Dell external optical enclosure with a DVD drive, and this one works flawlessly on my eSATA port even though the SATA Operation is still set to RAID, of course - so it looks like a marketing issue more than a technical one...

 

I'm getting tired of this. When I leave Optimus turned off I'm getting Standard VGA Video card, not even the Intel HD. Shouldn't it just turn on the Quadro?

Does anyone know how to get into the Intel Management Engine? I'm assuming that's a proper Bios.

I'm going to try the 275.50 Beta drivers and see if that does anything.

I'm having issues on wake, I think. Often I'm missing the Nvidia Driver Helper that tells you which apps are using the GPU, and the GPU temp is being reported as 0degrees.

Edit: The Intel Management Engine default pw is admin, and then you need to make a new 8 char password. It's pretty useless, not what I expected. Is there no proper Bios that I've been used to for the last twenty years?

 

I've been looking at the M6600 as a replacement for my W700ds (which has developed a flaky motherboard) for the past few weeks... There are very few alternatives these days. Sager's machines are fine (I've had several) but they're not built the way a business-class laptop is, and it shows, and HP's 8760 is inordinately expensive for what you get, even without the IPS display.

Anyhow, I came across some information in my research that may be of interest to other people looking at this machine that are hung up on the M8900 vs. Quadro 4000 cards: fabrizioT found that the stock clocks for the Quadro 4000m, are apparently 475/1250. But, according to Dell (see here), the stock clocks for the 4000m should be 675MHz core / 1GHz.

A 675MHz core clock would probably get it much closer to the M8900 in 3dmark than it is at 475, but the RAM being underclocked by 250MHz is very odd. I'm wondering if it's a typo on Dell's part, though, because notebookcheck indicates that nVidia specs 475/1200 for the 4000M; individual OEMs are free to do whatever they like, but I can't imagine Dell giving you a 200MHz overclock on a workstation GPU.

I'm not sure it matters at this point, though. I'm not an nVidia fan, but I was leaning toward the Quadro 4000 because 4 hours+ of battery life is the one thing I miss from my old (SR) Macbook Pro. "Was" being the key word, there.

The issues that people with Optimus have been posting about in this thread over the past few days have somewhat put me off, and in doing a bit of research (Tom's article here, Anandtech article here), the basically-a-GTX-480m Quadro 4000 is unlikely to be appreciably faster than the basically-a-GTX-280m Quadro FX3700m in my Lenovo. Certainly not enough so for a game that was unplayable on the 3700 to be playable at reasonable settings on the 4000.

So I guess it's the M8900 for me. Has anyone tried overclocking the AMD card? Someone mentioned that they accidentally installed the HD6970M driver on theirs by accident or something... What happened with that? Did you just download the Radeon Catalyst drivers by mistake and it automatically installed itself as a 6970 without complaint?

//EDIT: Has anyone tried throwing the x86-64 versions of either Fedora 14 or Ubuntu 10.04LTS/10.10 on theirs, by the way? Gnome 3 and Unity are some kind of sick, twisted joke and I've become accustomed to the speed of Gnome 2 versus Windows 7's Aero interface and I'd kinda like to continue dual-booting if I can.

Doesn't bashing F1 or F2 or F12 or delete or something during POST get you into the UEFI (I'm assuming this thing is UEFI since that's what the sandy bridge desktop boards are) control menu? That ought to be the functional equivalent of the BIOS menu on an older machine...