Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

I'm expecting delivery of my new m4400 tomorrow. I've been skimming over this thread, but at it's current length, it's a bit much! I've ordered it with Vista 32, but plan on going to Win7 x64 once the RC comes out.

With all of the issues that I've seen people here talk about - over heating with different BIOS revs, sound problems, etc. - is there a list any where of what drivers work best, BIOS rev is best, etc?

 

I have had zero issues, and just use the current drivers, etc....that's just one point of view

 

BIOS revisions from A04 to A11 may make your graphics card clock down, with A12 it got a little better. With the latest revision, BIOS A13, Dell changed the thermal tables, so the fan will go up one gear about ten degrees later that it would with A12, which may - depending on your particular device - cause the casing and/or the GPU core to get too warm.

I suggest you to try out A13 first, and if it's too hot for you, go back to A12. If A12 causes downclocking, there are still some people who prefer A02 and A03, so you could investigate in that direction then.

 

most problems i noticed ocurred with intel matrix storage manager 8.5-8.8.
so my hint is to use 8.2 or 8.8.2 versions.

regarding the termal tables
playing WOW Wotlk 1440x900 with medium setting i got ~40-50 frames in dungeons and no downclocking.

 

Hey new owner here. I just got this machine and so far its a great piece of hardware but from what im reading based on peoples specs im a little confused about a few things regarding performance.

SPECs for my M4400
X9100, 4GB, 320GB, 1700M, Vista32 SP1, 185.68

with the above I cannot get over 5700 poinds in 3D Mark 06. With stock Dell drivers nothing over 5200. What im reading about the 1700m tells me I should be scoring a lot higher especially since I sprung for the nicer CPU. Another thing im comfused about is the shader speed at 1500 when im reading people having 2500 as the default shader speed which is obviously effecting the performance here in someway.

PLEASE! someone shed some light on this for me.

 

Here's a new one for me.

Yesterday, as always, I brought my laptop to work, plugged in the external monitor, power supply, usb, etc. Brought it out of sleep mode and left the room. I came back about 20 minutes later to find that it was just about to shut down due to low battery. Easy fix - the power cable wasn't fully inserted.

I got it all the way in and moved the mouse to reactivate the screen. What you see in the picture below is what I found. The laptop's RGBLED screen had a severe green tint. At first I thought somehow the desktop background had changed. But then I moved some icons and windows from the external over to the laptop screen. It was evident then that the entire display was pushing green, very hard.

After two reboots the issue remained. I then shut it down and unplugged everything. I let it sit for about an hour. Upon boot, the problem was gone - all back to normal. The rest of the day it was fine. I figured it was a fluke.

Moments ago, I woke up my laptop to find the green is back. But now it is different. As I am typing this, the green is coming and going, in varying degrees and for varying lengths of time, from seconds to minutes. At most, it is to a lesser extent than yesterday, but it is persisting.

And over the last 2 minutes of writing, it has gone from fading in and out, to pretty much staying green (still less than yesterday).

Ok - now I see that moving the screen back and forth seems to inspire the fading in and out again. Hardware I'm guessing.

Any ideas? Time to make a warranty claim?

UPDATE: Adjusting the screen brightness all the way to the lowest setting, makes the color a RED shift.

 

Seems like an error on the blue channel... maybe something on the Display, maybe something on the display-cable. Cant be the GPU, because the external Display seems OK.

Time for a service-call

stil the same idea... display or cable... red screen says blue and green missing...

 

Dell is going to have a new screen sent out. More weirdness I just noticed. I am in my car - the sun coming in from behind me. When the sunlight is NOT hitting the screen, the color is normal. When the sunlight hits the middle of the far right side of the screen, the color issues starts. I'm guessing this is where the auto-dimming feature has its sensor. I do not have that feature enabled.

 

A while ago in this thread there was a discussion about getting the brushed metal back from the E6400 instead of the rippleback. Some guy managed to get one installed by a tech, but that was it. --but today, I just found an M4400 listed on the outlet site with "Black;Brushed Metal Black" under the color column. Intriguing.

 

Do you need to use this? What does it do/benefit?

From skimming the details on Intel's site - not sure how this would help on a 1 drive laptop.