New M6500 Discussion Thread

Having had one repair under my belt relatively early in the game to replace the display since the one I received had an unacceptable amount of completely dead pixels, I'll give my $.02.

I'd agree that the business division machines and the support contracts/people they come with are where the company shines. The guy that was sent out to service mine had no issue with coming to the other side of town to my house on his first visit, where unforunately after unboxing the replacement display we found it to be for an M6400 covet. Arranged to meet again the very next day. He was finished in no time flat, and seemed to be genuinely knowledgeable about this particular model. Having had the machine apart myself once already to put in ram and an ssd, it was easy enough to validate that everything went back together the right way.

I'll be calling them again soon since it seems like half of the touchpad on the unit has begun acting wonky... detecting double finger gestures when it shouldn't.

I will say though, from what I could ascertain anyways, I don't think he was a Dell payroll employee. Not completely surprised by this, even though I'm in Austin where you could probably find a significant portion of the population on the Dell payroll.

 

Your guess is right. My first technician was working for almost every professional notebook manufacturer I can think of. And I guess the second one did it too, like most likely all of their collegues. But there's nothing wrong with that.

When I (or my technicians) disassembled the device I couldn't see any label pointing to any company besides Dell. According to my documents the final assembling was done in Říčany (Czech republic) with some parts coming from Poland. I have no clue about the working conditions, but according to a friend of mine who lives there, the region of Říčany is not famous for dumping price work, but for being a commuter town of Prague mostly inhabited by people from the middle class. So at least european customers might sleep a bit better.

Why not? From the point of a manufacturer extremely cheap workers seem to be the best option. Did you know that the ancient Romans made it to invent the steam engine? But they simply had no use for it because of the vast amount of cheap slaves.

Sure it is annoying, but unless you want a dual monitor setup I see no technical problem. DVI-D and Display Port are compatible without quality loss.
btw: They surely didn't use DVI-D-VGA adaptors (passive). I know some dubious people sell that stuff, but it can't work due to technical reasons. You need a converter box (active) for this task. If you mean that, yes, the quality of these boxes really sucks.

 

I am using two 7200.4 500G Hard drive (raid 0)right now. Any suggestions on Strip size? I used 128K at before but the performance looked not good.

 

Mitchellboy, I can't answer that, but can I ask how the performance of two of those drives in Raid 0 compares to just a single drive? I mean is it significantly faster? Somewhat? Negligible? thanks

 

I think the RAID 0's performance is better than one single hard drive.
(1st capture is single 7200.4, 2nd the strip was 128K, Last one the strip was 4kb, All testing under Win7 64bit, Intel Matrix Storage Manager 8.9.4.1004)

 

From Intel Rapid Storage application

 

if its not too much trouble just work your way down and see how performance changes

 

thanks....I'm trying to do something about my harddrive performance...it's such a bottleneck...I'd like to have to space for my videos....wish the SSD's would come down in price quickly....way too much money IMO, but so was this laptop ...lol......

 

Nothing to do with 'eating profits'. It's about getting what I ordered.

As others have said, repairers don't have anything to do with Dell beyond a contract. And although they might be trained to deal with the systems, whether they put the systam back together to the level of a factory build is something else entirely.

My experience with the Dell notebooks I personally used in the last three years that has needed onsite repair - overwhelmingly the XPS M1330's - were exacerbated by hurried reassembly of the notebooks by onsite engineers. The only time the (natively piles of ****, but made even ****tier by the onsite repairs) M1330's were assembled correctly was when I insisted they go back to the repair depot for reassembly. One engineer left off two screws, ferchristssakes. And no I'm not going to hover over them like a hawk. They are supposed to know how to repair the damned thing.

ProSupport is excellent, and I rate their service highly. I subscribe to 24/7 4-hour response on most of my more critical servers / workstations and they have come through even in the early hours of the morning all but once in many years. As a comparison whoever is contracted with Apple, who until recently I used to pay around twice as much as Dell for the same thing, failed to turn up on multiple occasions (and they did give me part of my money back, but that's not the effin' point) and we actually had to use the DIY server repair kit that Apple offers which we picked up as a matter of curiosity initially (and that was when I really realised why they sell it) on two occasions.

But the repair is ultimately contracted to a third party and a good response doesn't necessarily mean a factory-level repair, especially in the case of laptops - which lets face it, even on a behemoth like the M6500 is still engineered for portability than maintainability.

It is, I might have said before, highly misguided in my view to consent to have a new machine with issues dealt by an onsite visit from the outset. Something goes wrong in a few months - well you have no choice, but the likelihood is much higher in my experience that if the machines arrives with everything as it should be, the chances of you needing a repair subsequently might be signicantly lower than letting a guy in a hurry rip apart your brand new machine.

Anyhoo, as I said I've made it clear to Dell that an onsite repair ain't happening for issues from new.

 

i can understand your point of view. I bought a gateway (C120X tablet) when it first came out and I did the same thing you currently do. They had no issues considering my laptop would not charge out of the box (literally) and I spent as much in warranties as the laptop so I expected to not to ever have an issue if something went wrong. I mean I bought every warranty, from accidental damage to screen replacement to free shipping (this was a consumer model). Even after I purchased the "free shipping" warranty they still tried to get me to buy a box and shipping every time I called in.

Well it turned out that when I sent in my laptop I actually "used up" my warranties and I told them I couldn't have used it up because I never got what I purchased (a working laptop). I ended up arguing with gateway on and off for over a year and eventually just contacted the better business bureau here in the states and finally got some decent service in less than a week after a year of bull****. Even so I still never got a fully functioning laptop, and in the end I would have preferred a technician to come to my house if for nothing more than just because of how poorly managed my cases were (about a year before acer acquired them). I should have checked out their long term stock trend (consistently downward since 2000), and just gone with another company before even buying their atrocity they called a tablet..

From there on out I only go with business notebooks for their build quality and warranty. I would rather have a technician come out to my house so I can promptly break one of his fingers when he screws up instead of having a laptop shipped back to me in worse condition than I sent it in which happened literally every time I sent in my gateway laptop. Needless to say I will never buy another gateway ever regardless of the circumstances.