New M6500 Discussion Thread

Mine will mostly be used for schoolwork, excel, word, powerpoint, and for AutoCAD, Sketchup, some gaming.

It appealed to me because of the screen resolution, the full size keyboard, the great graphics, dual hard drive capabilities, and overall size (not too heavy for a 17" with great graphics).

 

My M6500 is literally a desktop replacement... I sold my 5 year old Dimension with Pentium D (first Pentium dual core consumer processor) AND my old Inspiron E1405 laptop in order to pay for, err, almost one of the SSDs in my M6500

Main uses are:
- Web/Mobile/Software Development and Testing -> (50%)
- Photo Processing, Editing, and Management -> (30%)
- Family video editing and encoding -> (5%)
- General business management, office work, etc when needed -> (5%)
- Troubleshooting Problems with M6500 FIPS fingerprint reader -> (10%)

For software/web development I install a ton of heavy apps and usually run all of them with multiple instances simultaneously, depending on what project(s) I might be working on

Visual Studio 2008 & 2010
MS SQL Server 2008
Adobe FlexBuilder (and older Flex 2 & 3 versions installed for some projects)
Adobe Acrobat (PDF forms)
Eclipse
Various misc. development tools and control suites;
Obviously I run IIS7 and use the machine as a local web server as well

One of my goals with this machine was to create a bunch of virtuals and run a little virtual network right on the laptop. I can then install multiple instances of SQL Server and have a full-blown enterprise testing environment with DB's set up as linked servers, not to mention multiple OS/browser combos for Web development testing.

Also a Mac virtual for some Objective C (iPhone) development is something I've been trying to set up but not succeeded yet.

I plan to upgrade soon to 2x 256GB SSD and 16GB RAM and then I can freely dedicate 4-8 GB RAM to the virtuals and still have plenty left for other tasks.

Speaking of which, also I am an amateur photographer and I do my photo editing, processing, and management on this machine, (and my family video encoding from AVCHD because even though it's family video, I want the best quality for my own viewing pleasure); some of the software I am using for this is

Adobe Photoshop CS5
Adobe Premiere Pro CS5
Adobe After Effects CS5

Since it's a work/home machine in one, all of the servers, virtuals, services, etc,. all run at once whether I am loading Photoshop, just web surfing, or going to work on a project.

And the M6500 doesn't flinch.

But the &*##^!@@g fingerprint reader still doesn't work!

 

Haha dang, yeah I'm in college and I'm thinking of buying one from the outlet...

Anything wrong with the outlet?

How much did you pay for yours?

 

I just ordered mine from the outlet - ended up being around ~1330 shipped with tax, I'll let you know if there is any issues with it. I also ordered an E6410 from the outlet, but it came in broken still and ended up returning it.

 

Primarily drawing: AutoCAD 2011, SketchUp Pro 8 and Photoshop CS4... easy to bluetooth sketches in through my camera phone. Starting a DigArch module and beginning to learn 3dsMax. I'm fine tuning with AutoCAD as I sometimes lose mouse responsivity with large files, but all the others work flawlessly.

Secondary: Web browsing, email, watching films, Skyping etc.

...oh, and building strength in my abs, I've noticed a considerable improvement since this term began.

 

any have a make and model # for the blu-ray drive that can be installed on the M6500?

 

Panasonic UJ232

 

MAT$H1TA BD-RE UJ232A

 

I managed to get the FIPS working by installing the Dell Control Point Security Manager and the Wave Embassy software. Now I'm able to use it for pre-boot and log-in.

Has anyone had any luck for the Bluetooth?

 

Virtual Machines, Video Transcoding, Coding (compiling), custom CPU intense programs - just to mention what actually justifies to spend 2700 Euro.