Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

@ofelas
185.85 seems to be working well for me. Haven't loaded up any games w/ it yet, but it did knock the Windows Experience Index up a little bit, so polygon manipulation is a little faster if nothing else. I'm running Win7 x64.

Also, how's that Samsung SSD do for you? I tested a OCZ Vertex in my system (MLC w/ internal RAID0 across 2 banks) and the performance wasn't really any different from my 7200 RPM's as far as actual application responses (I did all the setup tweaks to make it work faster and used my second 7200 for the page file, etc). And what kind of battery life do you usually get from a 9 cell w/ your 9300?

 

You don't have to put the page file onto another disk. The pagefile by its nature greatly benefits from being placed on an SSD, if that SSD is good enough. The Vertex should be.

It's like the pagefile was made for SSDs (but it wasn't). Putting the pagefile on your HDD can even lengthen your application startup times again.

What tweaks did you use? (Some "tweaks" aren't really helpful and will actually decrease the performance)

 

I installed these for Win7 64 bit yesterday. Fallout 3 still plays fine (the only game i have). Adobe CS4 apps' UIs also seem a little faster.

My WEI for gaming went from 5.2 to 5.3 with these.

 

@newswami - it's working well on RC Win 7 x64 for me as well.
Wonder how effective it'd be under Vista x64 compared to Dell 179.47, which ran well for me.
I found a huge difference using an SSD; that, coming from a WD 7k 320GB & a WD 5k 500GB.
Felt like a new system; forget the paper numbers - it's way snappier, silent, runs cooler & shock proof.
The Samsung treats me well - I couldn't ever go to an Intel or MTron, as I'm simply not prepared to give up ~100GB for marginally improved benchmarks. Besides, having bought it from Dell, my rep told me it'd take on the NBD Warranty + Complete Care of the system.
I turn off indexing, Windows Search, System Restore & Scheduled defrag on HDDs as well as SSDs; besides that, there's apparently no real reason to disable superfetch/prefetch & create ramdisks. It's nice when superfetch loads 3GB+ of data into RAM instead of having unused memory just idle around.
I also scrap the page file with anything over 4GB of memory - haven't run out yet, though it's gotten close a couple times.
Hope that helped.

 

Yup, exactly the same as mine, 5.3 now.
I like Win 7, but it seems a bit flaky once in a while with Outlook 2007; I may blow it away & not waste too much more time on it.

On a slight side note - anyone else notice slightly cooler temps & a bit less fan usage using Win 7?

 

Yeah, forget the paper numbers. It's not easy to measure the perfomance of SSDs, because it's hard to find out the important drive characteristics. Remember when in the beginning, most people though that SSDs with more MB/s automatically beat SSDs with less MB/s? That was so wrong.

You don't need SuperFetch when running your system off an SSD. SuperFetch exists to come by the high average seek times of HDDs.
In Windows 7, Microsoft turns off SuperFetch and Prefetching by default if it's not some cheap SSD that suffers from stuttering. As far as I know, Samsung SSDs have never had a problem with high average access times that would cause stuttering or freezing of the computer.

I also tried that out initially, but came to the conclusion that having the pagefile disabled doesn't give a noticeable increase in speed. Maybe the Intel drive can handle that better than your Samsung drive, but I'm not sure.

 

And now for something completely different , got mine about 10 days ago. I'm quite happy with it, but have two minor issues:

- disk ticking sound
Disk is being accessed all the time when the computer is idle giving a ticking sound. Upgrading to IMSM 8.8 from 8.7 improved the situation a bit (also lowered latency coniderably). Is that normal? Is there a way to stop that idle disk access? I'm running XP Pro SP3.
- low buzzing sound when scrolling window content in a web browser with a mouse wheel
When I turn a mouse wheel and scroll a window content in a browser (either with web content or bookmarks) a low buzzing sound is heard from under the keyboard. It's quite low, so you neeed to be in a silent environment to hear it or get your ear close to the keyboard. When the window content doesn't scroll anymore and I continue to roll the wheel no more sound is heard. Anyone experienced that?

 

Try going into the bios and changing under the performance tab,HDD acoustic mode to performance.
Can also use software like notebook hardware control to do the same thing plus a lot of other thing's.

Yes,just about every notebook I've had has had made slight noise from the cpu [presumably] when doing different thing's,the solution is to not put your ear close to the keyboard....then you can't hear it.

 

Either way (Vista x64 or Win7 x64), the Dell 179.xx drivers that were out don't support PhysX. Therefore, the 18x.xx drivers give the card that advantage, but with the relatively low clocks, I didn't get any difference in FPS in 3dmark at stock speeds. Increasing the clock pushes the benefit to the 18x.xx drivers, and these 185's are faster than the 181's I was using.

 

There is a fix for a Seagate Drive ticking sound - make sure you have that:
http://support.dell.com/support/dow...1&impid=-1&formatcnt=2&libid=41&fileid=297636