Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

I've heard two sides to this.

1. The speakers on this suck and start to buzz at 50 percent

or


2. The speakers on this are pretty decent seeing that it's a laptop


3. I can let you know the 11th of this month... cuz' that's when mine should be here.

 

i leave mine on 100% most of the time. cant hear any buzzing?

the speakers are average for a laptop. its great for video calls, youtube videos, listening to audiobooks etc, but for proper music i'd use headphones.

quite average for a laptop. after all it dosent have a subwoofer like some of the 17 inch gaming laptops

 

Alright, thats good. That actually got me a little more excited because I thought they were gonna suck.

 

Of all the laptops I have had over the years, this one has, by far, the worst sounding speakers. Make no mistake. Even for a laptop, these speakers are pathetic.

I have never had a buzz (even when cranked high). Even when running Windows 7 and using microsoft drivers, they still work without any problem.

Long story short. They work well but don't have good audio quality (even for a laptop).

The only thing that helped me overcome my disappointment are the 2 following things.
1- External speakers and headphones sound great when plugged into the line out.
2- The other laptops I know that have the same crappy sound are Macbooks and Macbook pros.... and those laptops are great!

By the way, I love my m4400

Cheers!

 

I'd like to add that I actually thought the speakers were better than I had expected, having read all the negative comments about them. If you're used to subnotebooks like I am, then these speakers are as good, if not better, than nearly any subnotebook (the Lenovo X301 aside). Of course, that doesn't change the fact that the M4400's speakers are poor for a 15" laptop!

 

coming from an inspiron 8600, which had pretty darn good speakers for a 15" laptop, i was disappointed, but its not as bad as smaller notebooks, or the older "tin can" sounding ones.

works clearly for stuff you'd use them for regularly like VoIP, youtube or listening to audiobooks.

anyone who is interested in audio quality would use headphones or external speakers with any kind of laptop for that matter, no matter how good the built in speakers

 

Hey guys,
I was looking at Thinkpad W500s, but as I researched, I saw that this is the direct competitor and that it has a much better GPU. Apparently this dell laptop also has longer battery life. So it seems inevitable that I'll get this laptop.

But first, I want to know what the common problems and cons of this laptop are?

 

I am a new owner of a m4400 [qx9300 4GB Quadro FX 770M WUXGA] and am pretty happy with my choice of this laptop. I am running XP Pro (have Vista business CD as well but not plan to use it I tried running BadaBoom to convert a 1 hour 45 minute DVD video_ts folder to ipod M4V format and it estimated that it will need 76 minutes or so. Even then after about 8 minutes into the process it slows down and does not seems to be doing anything. I converted the same video using the free/trial AVS Video converter that took all 4 cores to max utilization and successfully converted it in around same time (75 minutes). So two questions:
(1) Do i need to update my video drivers so that BadaBoom runs successfully? I am using factory default
(2) Does FX 770M 32 cores not provide more horsepower than Intel's 4-cores? If so i might just use software based conversion than messing with CUDA specific programs?

TIA.

 

Though i have mine just for about a week, i noticed some stuff mentioned here on this forum is valid; i find the speakers not powerful enough and the touchpad to be finicky at times - many times i am trying to type in my password on the XP login screen and it just clicked elsewhere so the password field is deactivated and i end up typing in void.
Also the laptop does not come with any sort of manual and the user is expected to have above average technical know-how to set it up and get it up and running. I had to figure out 2 different blue screens of death on my own. Finally there is the Dell ConnectionManager that won't allow to use Window's connection manager to connect to WiFi but rather takes over the WiFi connection configuration. It is not bad so i left it in there but still want to know how can i edit a profile i created initially for location.

I would say for the money, this one is probably best bang for your buck. It is a very solid, professional laptop.

 

i've got no problems with the touchpad at all, i just turned off "touchcheck" in the mouse properties. its a silly feature that tries to prevent mouse movement if you accidentally touch with your palm while typing.

dosent work so well though