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Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge *Part 2*

Discussion in 'Dell Latitude, Vostro, and Precision' started by BatBoy, Oct 14, 2009.

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  1. theZoid

    theZoid Notebook Savant

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    It's bunk for sure. I allocated 3 gigs of ram to my XP virtual machine in VirtualBox, and when I go into system in XP (my VM), it shows I have 3 gigs of ram. Just want to quell a rumor. A notebook forum is not a good place for untruths to get spread around. It's good you brought it up though.

    I going to do some gaming now, and see what 8 gigs does for that. :D

    EDIT: Gaming is much smoother, very noticeable. No jerkiness in places. I'd say go for it if you, A: Have the money B: Game C: Use virtual machines.
     
  2. theZoid

    theZoid Notebook Savant

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    Thanks on both counts....the nvidia link is not good though
     
  3. afhstingray

    afhstingray Notebook Prophet

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    appears to be so. i have all the DCP software installed. it does hog a bit of hard drive space. but they seem to behave well (i.e. not hanging causing lockups etc)
     
  4. afhstingray

    afhstingray Notebook Prophet

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    beware of the driver though. over in the graphics subforum people are reporting it causes them to not be able to change screen brightness. not affecting everyone though, but quite a few reporting it
     
  5. theZoid

    theZoid Notebook Savant

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    brightness is AOK here....it did put double entries in control panel but I deleted them (the second entries didn't launch anything, so it was easy to determine which one to delete). (the last beta I used did that also.)
     
  6. Jonty

    Jonty Notebook Consultant

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    Thanks, theZoid, link fixed (that's what I get for guessing the address ><).

    No problems here with these drivers, but of course any beta software needs to be treated with caution, though nVidia's drivers are usually stable enough.
     
  7. sepulture

    sepulture Notebook Enthusiast

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    I'm looking for a powerful laptop that is barely audible when idle or under light load. How's the M4400 with P8800 and FX1700M? Is it noisy?

    If so, do you happen to know any alternatives, except maybe the Lenovo T500?
     
  8. Christoph.krn

    Christoph.krn Notebook Evangelist

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    Hello selpulture,

    with the latest BIOS installed, the fan of my M4400 (see signature) is not running at all under light load (surfing the web, "Office use"), and barely audible even with some more load (multiple virtual machines running while using Photoshop CS4 (even though CS4 uses the GPU)). It only gets loud when heavily using the GPU (but not with light GPU usage such as having Window's Aero enabled). I have to note that exchanging the HDD for a SSD helped lowering the temperature quite a bit, at least in my particular case. The P8600 in particular really helps in keeping the machine cool under light load, and the P8800 shouldn't be much different.
     
  9. afhstingray

    afhstingray Notebook Prophet

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    yea the latest bios is good. an alternative is maybe the W500
     
  10. theZoid

    theZoid Notebook Savant

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    Followup: I went back to Nvidia 186.81 stable....I was getting some strange window behavior, like window control freezes, with that beta driver. All seems well now.
     
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