Precision M4400 Owner's Lounge

lptp: he meant he had to disable the port to stop his itunes from making clicking noises...

i think people using winxp are gonna have to wait for driver updates. did you try running vista to see if there was any issues? if there are no issues under vista, it means you're problems are from the xp drivers

 

Thats pretty good if they do,seems to be a fairly split preference for glossy v matt........look forward to your comments Yanik,when you recieve it.

Seems most people usng XP have had sound problem's,a couple of people early on stated that using the windows built in audio driver in Vista didn't have any problem.

I'm certainly very interested in your findings though,with audio being your hobby,you obviously have a bigger interest in sorting it out than I do,although I did send numerous emails to dell support early on,with no solution apart from being told we would have to wait for engineering to release a new driver.

One of the members here,found that disabling the onboard speakers when connected to external output improved the sound quality markedly,which is what I've been doing since,when listening to music.....its almost like dell have done this on purpose to protect the tiny onboard speakers from trying reproduce full frequency music.....but the popping etc that yourself and some others are getting is something I haven't suffered from.

Like yourself,I found Ubuntu 8.04 to be better than XP as far as audio quality goes,but I haven't ordered the 8.10 disc yet........did your intel wifi card [5100,5300]work out of the box with the 8.10 build ?

 

Noooooo....my fans seem to stay running at full speed again!! Thought i got rid of that with the new system
Guess i'll have to switch to A03 again....really weird how that suddenly happens now, been doing quite some heavy work since the new lappy arrived and the fans always went down...no overheating either. GPU didn't go over 73 and is at 52 now with CPU at 21

 

Hey madengineer.

I just tested things in Vista. The audio glitching problem is a lot less predictable in Vista compared to XP (or at least, I haven't found out what combination of things causes problems). With the newest IDT driver, the playback works without a problem sometimes, while other times, it can glitch a bit (but not as frequently as in XP). The glitches happen whether or not the PC Card and eSATA devices are turned on/off in the BIOS, so the recommendation to turn off eSATA (or the PC Card) seems to hold for XP, but not necessarily for Vista.

The glitches also happen with the default Microsoft driver.

Compared to the audio problems in XP, the glitches in Vista seem to be qualitatively different and less frequent. In XP, the signal would drop out and resume (with the sine wave still in the same phase as before the signal dropped out), while in Vista, the glitches seem to be "stuttering" (that is, the sine wave's phase is clearly shifted after the stutter). If I find out anything more on Vista, I'll post info on it.

 

Hey mfr. I found that you can disable either the PC Card/1394 device OR the eSATA device to stop audio problems in XP (so if you need the eSATA, try disabling the PC Card). In Vista, it's not clear what helps the most (though there have been a number of posts here for other fixes).

Should you make a storm about it? Why not? For 1700 euros, it should be able to play music as well as a 50 euro MP3 player, shouldn't it?

External soundcards *may* fix the sound problem, but the one external sound interface I tested (Pro Tools MBox2 Micro) still had issues when the eSATA and PC Card devices were both enabled. Which kinda sucks.

 

Hey Weegie. Yeah, my Intel 5100 worked out of the box with Ubuntu 8.10, which was cool

 

I'm not entirely sure this belongs in this thread, but since we were just discussing the screens, I thought it might be appropriate: the option to choose the screen seems to have (temporarily?) disappeared from the M4400 configuration page!

It makes me feel like I've taken crazy pills or something. I configure a system online basically every day (hoping to see a price decrease while I bide my time for another Precision-applicable coupon to appear), and suddenly losing the option to choose a screen is very strange. Perhaps they are updating the screen options (either wording, pricing, or otherwise)?

 

It's OK..............

Display options are just listed under "Floppy Drives".....:laugh:
Silly Dell.

 

12/1/2008 is the current projected ship date for my order, hopefully WITH the RGB LED this time.

After only spending about an hour with the "wrong configuration" 4400 that I returned, I am really looking forward to the "right" one. The keyboard was much nicer to type on than this HP nx7400 and the Dell 2 ccfl display was magnitudes better than the display on this machine. I was a bit concerned about going to 1920x1200 on a 15.4 screen, this one is 1680x1050 and it was an adjustment to get used to the tighter resolution with text, but the Dell screen was so much better than this screen it was a total non issue.

And since audio has been the topic for a couple of days, the audio is terrible on this HP nx7400 as well, business class notebooks are just not designed with audio as much of a priority I guess. I don't think even some of the first notebooks that I owned sounded as tinny as this HP.

Thomas

 

What the heck! How did it get moved to there? And why is there even a Floppy Drives category?