New M6500 Discussion Thread

You mean replacement chassis panels or an actual travelling/protection case?

 

I have an extra Dell Wireless 5540 mini card. And I installed it in my 6500.
But now I'm still hunting for the driver. Driver from Dell Lattitude/Precision 4500 site doesnt work. Anybody know a driver for this? Or this device doesnt really work on the Precision M6500.

 

Did you enable it in the BIOS?

 

I had been thinking seriously about getting myself one of these M6500s for quite some time, but kept putting it off. Now I see the M6600 is out but with a smaller (not as high) screen. Bummer! I was wondering how long the M6500 might be available? What do you folks here think about that (I'm not a laptop expert, just a poor coder who likes to see lots of lines of code).

Since I tend to use and keep laptops forever, I'm kind of thinking it would be dumb to start out with not the latest and greatest (M6600), but that smaller screen is causing me agony. What do you guys think?

Then on Dell's website you got to call for prices on the M6500. I wonder if I'd get gouged?

 

The M6500 is out of production for around three months now. Only way to get one is via refurbished over Dell Outlet via the phone or acquire one via eBay or second-hand.

 

I believed it was already enabled. In the device manager, theres a exclamation on the Dell 5540. So the system already detected the device but no driver.

 

We just purchased another M6500 recently via the outlet store. We got a good deal I believe. No price gouging. Go to the dell outlet store (small business) and look for the m6500 under Precision Workstation Laptops.\\Their inventory is constantly changing from minute to minute. Best time to check is usually on a Saturday morning, but a sweet configuration can show up in the outlet store at any time.

They come with a 1 yr warranty. You can extend that up to 5 yrs total (just as if you ordered it new). The one we ordered from the outlet had some damage to the screen but after I contacted support they came out and replaced the entire lid/display NBD, no charge to us of course.

They obviously won't have the latest sandy bridge i7 cores, but the m6500 is certainly not "outdated" in either the CPU,GPU or design.

 

No, not even close to being outdated....they have USB 3.0, i7's etc....I have a Vostro 3350 I just bought with Sandy Bridge i5, ATI card to take with me....it's pretty darn fast for a 13 inch laptop, and will run my games easily. But the M6500 walks all over it, all day long....and the screen is awesome. M6500 isn't close to becoming outdated yet....Dell would like you to think so, I'm sure

 

I'm presently in the process of selling my M6500 at a throw away price, it's immaculate condition, but is in the UK>

DELL PRECISION M6500 LAPTOP: intel i7 820-QM RGBLED 8GB | eBay

 

Freddie,

Respectfully, it sounds to me like you have misinterpreted the market slightly and may be on the verge of making a huge mistake. Let me explain.

There is something to be said for the logic you present, i.e. buy the latest/greatest if you're going to keep it a long time. But the 6600 offers only very marginal improvements, primarily the Sandy Bridge processor line. For users who care a lot about screen real estate, the 6600 is actually a serious DOWNgrade from the 6500, as discussed at length much earlier in this thread.

So I think that in this particular case, you are looking at it the wrong way. I suggest that a better perspective would be, "I can pay full price for the m6600, or I can get almost exactly the same thing for half price because Dell is fire-sale pricing the remaining m6500 inventory through the Outlet".

Obviously, if you need to do something only the m6600 can do, buy an m6600. For example, I believe it can drive FOUR external monitors. But unless you definitely need something unique to the 6600, for crying out loud, take advantage of the screaming bargains on factory refurbished m6500s available right now.

One place where I disagree with the previous commenters - in my experience, it was impossible to find a good system and buy it directly from the Dell outlet. The problem is that the ebay resellers use robots to monitor the Dell Outlet website, and when a good deal comes on, it generally gets scooped up within a few seconds by the bots. I tried for several days to wait for a good looking system to come up and then click "BUY NOW" as fast as I could, but every time it was gone before I could get to it. The only solution I know of is to just accept that you're going to get scalped a little by these guys. They seem to be just marking them up 10% or so and turning them around in a day or two. Go to ebay.com and search for "m6500", and you'll be able to choose between an excellent selection of factory-refurb m6500s. You're going to pay a markup of $200 or so to the guys with the robots. Sucks but I don't know how to beat them, so I just joined them...

Hope this helps,
xPat