Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

I have a Dell E4310 and love everything about it except the touchpad and crap resolution. How is the touchpad on the Dell M4500? Particularly, I'd like to know if 2 finger scroll actually works well? Because the E4310 is terrible in that aspect.

Also, every review I've read complains about the heat output, even with the core i5. Is it really that bad?
I'm looking for something with these specs:
- i5 520m or 540m
- nvidia 1800m

 

I run an i520 and without having done any hard processing with it, it does put out alot more heat than my 4 y.o Acer TravelMate 4060. But having said that, the heat isn't an issue. I would look at a cooling pad in the future if the temps get too high.

 

Loks like I answered my own question. I downloaded the driver from another IP address, and it worked. So the file was corrupted in some way.

 

I have the i5 M540 with the NVidia 880M, and I haven't noticed any heat problems. I bought the i5 series specifically because of heat and battery life concerns. I decided the performance difference for the i7 series wasn't worth it. I've been very happy so far. This laptop does generate more heat than my old laptop (D820), but it is not a problem for me.

 

I have the same spec as what your considering, my only issue is that dells firmware turns the fan on at a too high temp, thus the heat soaks through the bottom and palm rest, when under load and the fan is actually going, it's barely even warm, the heatsinks are pretty beefy in this model and it gets rid of heat really well....it's just when not under load, the fan rarely turns on.
I'm pretty picky about heat because I use it mainly as a laptop, so, no it's not bad


Wouldn't have a clue what makes a good touchpad, as it's disabled and never gets used sorry

 

I bought a second hand M4500 with i5 540M and FX 880M. However the charger cable is a bit damaged and the bios says is an unknown type and will not charge the battery. I have the 90w PA-10 charger, while here i see most ppl have the PA-13 charger. Which one should i get? Also any ideas for good replacements (that will charge the battery) couse original Dell chargers cost quite a bit...

 

What a great forum to find out the details about this laptop! Still 80 pages to read through the thread, but I couldn't wait to post, so sorry if some stuff has been addressed already.

Ok, so initially I was looking for a new laptop with as primary requirement that it had to support 8GB RAM (reason explained later). Then as I was researching, this evolved towards going that extra step and considering it all at once as a replacement of my 4-year old Athlon X2 3800 - 2GB desktop machine. Lately I always had in my mind that I didn't really need much additional CPU performance on the desktop side. That I would therefore sit it out another 1-2 years and rely on adding an SSD and fast USB3.0 external storage to boost my desktop experience fairly cheaply, and in a way that I could carry investments over to some Sandy-Bridge based new system later. But then the need for a portable 8GB solution arose, and I took note of the dockingstation-option, and suddenly I realised it would be foolish to consider a future desktop upgrade at all. I'm not a gamer and also not a super-performance user, so I figured todays performance laptop would easily cover my CPU-needs for at least 3-4 years, and with the docking station, and sizable SSD upgrade probably mainstream somewhere in the next 1.5 years, I wouldn't even notice anymore that I was using a laptop.

Anyway, so I've been looking at the M4500 the last couple of weeks. Lots of questions already answered in the first 20 pages of this thread. I especially liked the pointers to the option of adding an additional 2"5 disk in the optical bay, because the diskspace penalty compared to a desktop was that one issue that bothered me most in my scenario. Feels good to know that at a later time I can pop in, say a 256GB SSD as system drive and use the 500GB mechanical drive, or by then a 1TB model, in the optical bay.

Still some things I'm pondering:

- the initial motivation for a new laptop comes from the requirement to do some VMWare workstation stuff without bogging down too much. So therefore the 8GB requirement. I was wondering how much of a difference quadcore makes against dualcore in that respect. The virtual machines are primarily for self-study of operating systems, network (so I imagine it would be nice to have 3-4 systems running at once) and software, so not for any production stuff. Is it worth to go for (the cheapest) quadcore option for such usage scenario? Other than that, Photoshop is probably the only somewhat performance-hungry app that I would use regularly.

- is there a chance that DELL will release a docking station with USB 3.0 support somewhere down the line? USB3.0 was always my idea of my next hardware upgrade for the old desktop, but the lack of support in the laptop and current docking-station kinda kills that... Somehow a solution with a card doesn't appeal to me. But then again, maybe eSATA (which I have absolutely no experience with) is just as good, especially in a situation where the disk doesn't get carried around a lot and can remain connected to the docking station? I recently bought an internal 1TB 3"5 SATA which I'm not prepared to throw away, so I could simply get myself an external USB3-eSATA enclosure for that one...

- since I know about the optical bay additional HDD option, it's less important, but I was wondering: when I'm ordering online in Belgium, I have absolutely no option to add the 64GB SSD bootdrive. Just one disk possible it seems???

- what is this ON Flash option exactly? Is it mail/browser without booting Windows, just pushing a button? How fast is it available in that case, any drawbacks for surfing that way? Is it something that comes automatically with the laptop, since I can't see the option when ordering online?

- I was wondering about something else... Right from the start I had skipped the consumer DELL laptops for three reasons: too flashly (I like business looks more), not advertised with more than 4GB (although possible with some of them after all), and my fear that most of them will have a glossy reflective screen anyway. Now, even if it would turn out that say an XPS would meet my performance needs, some of those reasons are still strong enough to let them pass ( I also wonder if any of them are powerful enough, yet smaller than 16") .But now very recently I found out that the E6410 and E6510 are also available with 8GB, the latter even with quadcore as well. With this configuration there is hardly any price difference with the M4500, though. I wonder which factors set these 3 options most apart? When I started comparing myself, it seems that 1600x900 screenres is only available for the M4500, which would push me towards that machine regardless, since it is by far the best balance between resolution and size IMO. But what else is there to say about this, especially from the point of view of someone who doesn't really *need* the Quadro with 1GB? I mean, if there was an option to drop the videocard for a lower-performance one and save say a hundred bucks, I wouldn't hesitate in my case.

Thanks for your thoughts,

JH-man

 

I just don't get it...

When I go to the "print overview" option on the final screen of the online orderform, there's a tab "all options", and on this screen the option of a second harddrive shows 8 available options (of which "not included" is selected)?? But those are not shown during the configuration process?

Also, what are the main differences between the Core i7 7XX,8XX and 9XX series? Especially the price difference between the 740 and 820 intrigues me. Surely it is NOT only a 2MB cache difference that is responsible for the EUR255 gap in price?

 

I also just noticed that the tech specs mention 2 memory slots that support upto 16 GB. Does this mean they anticipate not-yet-existing 8GB modules?

 

^^^
To answer one question that I know the answer to, the quad core supports 4 channels for memory. Dual core supports 2 channels.

And thanks for the thorough responses fellas. Good info you can't find in reviews. Last question, I got my latitude from the outlet win a 25% coupon code, does dell ever release outlet coupon codes for current precision models?