New M6500 Discussion Thread

I am considering buying the m6600. The main reason for buying it, is to be able to run my simulations on different sites.

By simulations I means that all 4 cores are running at full capacity for many hours, and from time to time, days.

The issue with my present laptop is heating, the laptop cannot function like that for long periods of time. First the plastic of the laptop near the CPU and GPU started to crack, and than the fans start making noises, and later It stopped due to overheating. The laptop MTBF is not something to be proud of.

My current mode of work is to run on servers, and connect to them with my laptop. This has many drawbacks, I am trying to avoid.

I am hoping to understand if the new Dell m6600 can meet my expectations. Does anyone have experience with the m6500 and similar application?

Thanks

 

Is 3 consecutive days of constant 100% CPU usage due to video transcoding similar enough for you?

 

I meant the screens. I have seen LG screens manufactured in 2009 and late 2010. The later ones gave me better results.

Using the i1 Pro profiles, instructing Windows 7 to load it every time and dimming down the screen to around 120 cd/m2 (about 5th step from the bottom in the brightness scale according to Dell Control Point) I get reasonably low color saturation in non color managed applications and am, by now, well used to it and happy overall.

 

Well, my 6500 froze again today on the 32 bit side. Dell techs coming to replace the video board now.

 

1st day of moderate use of my refurb and all of a sudden my touch pad isn't responding at all. The touchpad icon at bottom of the screen appears to have gone blank and I had to use the btn in middle of the keyboard as my mouse. After restart everything went back to normal. Anyone else have this happen to them?

 

I have two M6500s and I experienced this on both - touchpad freezes together with tray touchpad icon. On one M6500 I even replaced the palmrest recently (togheter with touchpad) but no difference ... If you kill the Synoptics process in Task manager the trackpad becomes responsive again, you can ever restart Synoptics software and it will work again for a while ... I found no other solution for this issue yet ... this seems to be another design (hardware or software) failure of the M6500 ...

 

Yes if you did it a few dozen of times. The effects take time to be shown. It is a slow process, that took about a year of hard work (~8 hours per day) until the start of the crack appeared.

Did you use a cooling device of any kind?

 

I think that the best sign (and the first one notice before the cracks appear) that something is not functioning right, is the heating of the laptop. Suppose you want to send an email while it it running a 100% CPU for a few hours, can you place your hands comfortably and type? With my laptop it was impossible, the left hand could not be placed on the hot plastic, for the time needed to send an email.

 

I just did it twice, but I had nearly two dozen transcoding sessions of 8 hours or more.
Yesterday I started another task that puts two cores on 100% and might take up to three months in the worst case. I might be able to save 50% of the time by using 4 cores, but I'll first have to check if the task scales well.
I'll let you know if my M6500 blows up.

No, I don't use a cooling device. My CPU is currently at 67°C and stable.

 

The solution to this "design failure" as you so eloquently put it is to replace the Dell driver with the OEM Synaptics (not "Synoptics") driver. After reinstalling from scratch a number of months ago, I tried the latest version of the Dell "enhanced" Synaptics driver and observed the same.... freezes within minutes. The driver directly from Synaptics' site hasn't failed me a single time in the five months since my reinstall. Plus multifinger trackpad gestures for scrolling/etc work pretty reliably.