New M6500 Discussion Thread

It all work for you?

 

Hello all,
No it does not work.
Even with low values of the video card, the screen freezes and the mouse does not answer anymore.
The problem must be elsewhere (motherboard?).

cordially

 

Congrats mate. The UWB is a white elephant if you have nothing to pair it up with. I have the i7-940XM, not much difference from the 920XM.

5000M GPU is rare as hen's teeth and will definitely cost you an arm or a leg or even a kidney or two... if you find one it will cost somewhere around the price for a K5100M. Go figure...

Hinge cover with a fingerprint reader... I have it too, just gave up on using it. It is a can of worms by itself.

I have NFC palmrest too. Great for scanning stuff but not much other use though. What I did was to rip the NFC reader from my M6400 palmrest (the palmrest cracked and snapped) and install it into the M6500 palmrest.

 

You will discover that the NFC reader is just using double sided tape and taped onto the palmrest. Ribbon and connector wise, it is in the same spot as the M6500.

 

Greetings all. Seeking advice to keep my underspecced M6500 going. Please don't laugh TOO hard at my lack of knowledge.

It's an odd spec, an I7-620, 4GB ram, 500GB primary drive, and the WUXGA RGB-LED display. I'm an instructor at a local university, and it's mostly used for fairly basic tasks (Word, Excel, etc.) and entertainment (It has my music collection on it). It's running dog slow, which I assume is due to the low ram amount. IIRC with only 2 DIMM slots I'm capped at 8GB, so that's a priority. Best to just use Crucial for memory, or is there a better option?

As far as expanding the local storage, am I best off adding a drive in the 2nd bay, or replacing the primary with a 1TB SSD? I'd like to keep it running Win 7 (I'm old as dirt LOL), but keep hearing MS is killing off security updates for that OS. Best to just buy a new drive, install Win 10 on it and learn it, and copy the contents of the old one over? Or consider a hybrid drive for the OS?

Any advice is much appreciated. I'm obviously not savvy with this stuff (I've done fairly brainless things like add memory before), but don't want to get over my head. This guy has served me well since 2011, I love the keyboard, and the 16:10 display is easy on my old eyes. I want to keep it running, even if the battery is history and dies in 15 minutes if it's unplugged...

Many thanks!

 

Just to tide you over until someone more expert replies ...

I'm an oldie too. I have 2 of these mouldering unused for ? years, I used to buy them second-hand for screen-capturing live online webcams 24/7, but I fear they'd already been hammered to within an inch of their lives.

Some uneducated thoughts:

Have you tried saving your data, formatting C-drive and reinstalling Win7? I have found that can be helpful. If you install Win10 you'll have to put up with monthly (at least) updates, some of which will no doubt cause the odd problem with the system - and I fondly imagine that there will be (possibly free) AV products taking care of Win7's security for the foreseeable future.

RAM - Personally I would stick with Crucial as a reliable brand - given the tasks required, I don't think that forking out on a super-duper brand would give perceivable benefit. 8GB should be perfectly adequate.

DRIVE - Cost/benefit, I would go for an approx 240GB SSD, just for the operating system and programs to be installed on, and wipe your current drive and keep it as D-drive for storage. You should be able to leave the existing drive in situ and add the new one to a slot that I can't remember the name of right now (see? I'm showing my age ) and tell the BIOS to boot from that drive. It's not difficult but you should get advice on what order to do things in.

You might check how much space your current data is using, it isn't likely to be huge if it's mainly music and text docs.

I hope that my reply might encourage more, even if they only dive in to criticise my thoughts

 

@clemenzina is pretty spot on with his reply.

RAMS - The i7-620m is a dual core mobile CPU, so you are stuck with two DIMM slots. The max memory you can go is either 2 x 4GB = 8GB (go with this) or 2 x 8GB = 16GB (don't go with this, it is just FYI). However, the second option requires very specific ram make and type and is not always successful. You will need DDR3 1066 rams and don't bother with rams with faster speeds. Avoid DDR3L as not all of them support DDR3 supply and signalling levels. Brand wise Crucial is ok but the M6500 is a bit picky with rams so do take note.

DRIVE - The M6500 is an odd beast. It has an m.SATA slot but it works in very odd ways. So to save you the grief, don't use the m.SATA slot. Just replace your existing 500GB HDD with a 512GB SSD (which is fairly cheap these days). You will need to make sure the SSD height is 9mm or you will need a spacer to be installed. Afterwards, move your existing HDD to the 2nd HDD bay and u will be fine. Install Windows into the SSD and off you go! You will never look back once you tasted SSD blood!

OS - Windows 10 ain't that bad. It will work on the M6500. You can still get a free upgrade from Win7!

My family computer is my old workhorse... the M6500! It is using the i7-940XM with 32GB rams.

 

After upgrading our M6500 to Win10 some time ago I can't figure out how to use touchpad scrollbar gestures. I don't have horizontal or vertical scrollbar gesture anymore. Is there a solution to this, some software app or regedit change to enable touchpads scrollbar gestures?

Thanks!

 

Hello everybody,

I have a Dell Precision M6500 workstation and I use Windows 10 in the latest version, my hardware works very well with Windows 10 but I only have a problem with the audio, in reality there are no compatible audio drivers, but I would like to know if someone has been can handle this problem and how. I tried from the Windows update catalog where I find idt audio driver and tempo which is the company that acquired idt, also I tried to install precision m6400 drivers or other laptops with the same audio chip, but nothing works for me. Has anyone installed Win10 on P6500 and been able to make the audio work?

thanks fo reply.

 

Hey all !
(I've already posted my question in the accessories forum http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...cision-m6500-into-an-external-monitor.833059/ but I repost it here as it's for my old M6500 )


What do you think of using an hdmi capture card to transform my M6500 (with a still nice 1920x1200 screen) into a monitor ??

(just bought a new laptop but don't want to throw away this old Dell Precision M6500 yet, it still works fine ...)

In this video they talk about a capture card which is about $70 on aliexpress,
apparently ( https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000772976996.html ) they say this capture card works with an i7 and my M6500 has an i7 640M ... also they say the card does some work so that the CPU doesn't have too much work to do ...

(I tried SpaceDesk Viewer (HTML5 in linux), it's nice but sometimes it's really heavy on the CPU of my M6500 ... I am going to install Windows on my M6500 to check if it's going to be nicer on the Viewer's CPU ... (but it'll still request more work on the server CPU than an hdmi cable ...) )

Thanks for your help !