Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

nope , your results at wprime is great , i was more bothered about the the dpc latency , may i ask if you done the dpc test with the wireless disabled on the control panel , switch the power scheme to audio pro , no firewall and antivirus ....?

 

Despite the best efforts of the Dell sales people to talk their way out of a sale (but not having a clue about their product line), I am finally a reasonably satisfied owner of an M4500. I guess it comes down to the old adage: The only vendors worse than Dell are all of the other vendors. Anyway, a few queries/discussion points if I may. Please forgive me if some of these questions have been answered elsewhere - I did some searching through this owner's thread but I couldn't quite find the answers that I'm after.

My M4500 was pretty much maxed out in spec. I got a pretty decent processor (i7 Q840 @ 1.87 GHz); 8 GB of RAM, the Quadro FX 1800M, and the combination of the 64 GB Samsung SSD PM800 mSATA (MiniCard, I believe it is called), in addition to a regular 7200 RPM 500 GB disk. I'm runnnig Win7 64-bit Ultimate.

I plan to mostly get rid of the DVD burner from the modular bay and buy some of the cool cadies from New Modeus and use one to stick in a second SATA hard drive, which I plan to make a 7200 RPM, 500 GB Momentus XT (which comes with an SSD cache alledgedly making it 80% faster than a regular SATA disk). I'll probably replace the original 500 GB drive that the M4500 shipped with with another 7200 RPM, 500 GB Momentus XT and use the original one as a backup drive which I'll probably stick into another of the cadies. (I was pleasantly surprised to find that the DVD bay was modular. The Dell told me that Dell were doing fixed DVDs now and were no longer doing modular bays.

I use the SSD for the O/S, major applications like Office, Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc., and the disks for data, databases, dev environments, etc. The SSD is already up to about 56 GB, so I need to be careful what I install there.

Now, some questions:

1. The audio volume that I get out of the headphone socket is pretty low. I have to turn up the volume controls on the mixers to max, the volume control on Winamp to max, and even use the preamp on Winamp to try and get a decent amount of volume when playing into a standard set of Sony headphones (the kind with pads, not ones that you stick in your ears - I hate them). On other Dells I've not had a problem getting plenty of power out of the headphone socket. On this one even with everything pretty well maxed out the sound output isn't really adequate. Makes it hard to hear music in planes and drown out the driver's radio in taxies. Anyone else experienced this with their M4500? Anyone found any workarounds or configurtations to get a decent amount of power coming out of the headphone jack? Do there exist any USB headphones that draw power out of the USB to give further (enough) amplification?

2. I've looked all over my M4500 and found all manner of expansion bays and slots. However, I couldn't find where the Samsung PM800 SSD lives. Anyone located it? Can it easily be pulled out? What I want to do is buy more equivalent SSD MiniCards and image the whole C drive (O/S and major application installs that live on the SSD) so that if the SSD failes I can slot in a copy of it.

3. The Samsung SSD Minicard currently seems to come in 16, 32 and 64 GB. Anyone know if they plan to go to 128 GB? 64 GB just does the job of being a C drive, but 128 GB would be a lot more comfortable. Are there any competitor products in the same form factor (and more capacity) that could be slotted in?

4. Anyone know if Dell or anyone else will do a modular battery for the M4500? It is good to have the modular battery to allow smooth swapovers of the primary battery for a spare if you're not near outlet power.

5. Is it possible, or will it be possible in future to go beyond 8 GB in the M4500?

Cheers,

Rob

 

The US online ordering system offers the 2x8GB option right now. But it's safe to say that you'll want to wait a couple of years, instead of tripling the price of the laptop by wanting 16GB right here and now.

 

Hi all,

I'm about to buy an M4500 and I had a question on the hard disks:

I'd like to get 120 gigs or so of SSD storage on it, and I'm cheap. So I was thinking of replacing the stock hard 7200rpm hard disk it ships with (320gb) with a 120GB SSD. (I don't need a lot of storage; the machine will be used for software development and 120GB should be plenty of basic storage; we'll throw a USB external disk on it for extra storage.)

Is there anything I need to know when picking out a replacement for the main (i.e. not the PCIe minicard) drive? I assume most 2.5" SSDs would work (I can see Crucial lists the RealSSD C300 as an option.) Has anyone on this forum done this and do they recommend any particular make/model?

Thanks in advance!

- Alex

 

I tried and have given up on using the C300 in my M4500. Main reason was that the machine would reliably bluescreen each and every time it woke up from sleep. I updated the firmware of the SSD, and tried various BIOS options, and power management options in Win7, but nothing helped.

 

I have been having an issue with my video driver. I run AutoCad 2011 every day. Every once in a while, it will freeze up and say "Program not responding". And sometimes it will freeze and a window will appear and say "video driver has stopped responding and has recovered". Does anyone have an idea what could be causing this?

 

Does it reside in the WWAN slot? My understanding was that either you could have the WWAN or mini-SSD, but not both. Though I'm not really sure.

 

Yeah, good advice. I've always waited a couple of years before upgrading the RAM. Good to know 16 GB is a possibility.

 

I just read in a Latitude 6510 thread that it was possible to disable processor cores in the BIOS to save battery time. Is this supported in the M4500 BIOS as well? It might be worth it for a quadcore i7 when using the laptop for lighter work on the road.

 

Hello,

I have a new (one month) Dell M4500 with WIN 7 64 bit.
I have every day random freezing of the computer and the only thing to do is to shut it down by pressing the shot down button for 3 seconds.
I see in the internet that a lot of M4500 suffer from it.
Is there any checked solution for it because it is very annoying!!!

TNX,
Ilan.