Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

I don't get the sound. Also, I can't adjust the brightness instantly. It goes one step at a time. If I hold down fn+down arrow button, it only goes down one step and stays there.

 

If you use the slider in Power Options from the Control Panel, you can adjust the brightness down all the way in one step.

 

I see. Ok, yeah if I do that really fast back and forth and put my ear an inch from the laptop, I can barely hear a slight chirping sound. Portableman9, is it really loud for you? I would say if it bugs you maybe use the keyboard shortcuts or don't drag the slider so fast. I wouldn't think it's really something to worry about.

 

I have the Seagate Momentus XT 500 gig hybrid drive and like it. It is noticeably faster than a 7200 rpm drive. It takes a few days to optimize the cache I believe.

Has anyone else had to roll back the Windows updates from yesterday? Mine went into a reboot loop like it does if you mess up the sata mode.

 

The only option in the Dell BIOS is "RAID-on" which is IRRT [intel rapid restore technology], the intel rapid storage application won't give the option of creating an array like it outlines in the application help, for me anyway, unless your seeing something different.
As far as I can make out, it's just like the M4400 and doesn't support striping [RAID 0] I also mentioned this in the ideastorm post I made when I was moaning about the snail pace posting speed, and got the answer from the Dell guy that I could buy a M6400 or M6500 to get striping because they have two drives!

 

thanks for your reply. so i guess raid 0 basically WILL NOT WORK.

urgg.....

 

Well, I don't have my M4500 here right now so I can't check. But I'm pretty sure that I DID see a RAID option in the configuration screen that you can open at boottime when the Intel application kicks in. And also in the Intel Windows application. But you're right that it could be only RAID 1, though... Might take another look at home, although with everything set up the way it should be just a couple of days ago, I'm not going to actually TRY a RAID setup...

 

Before I got the NVIDIA driver update I ordered the high-end docking station (?Pro). I am running two monitors off it (30" and 23"). Has anyone every gotten a third to run?

 

I have an M4500 with a 256 Samsung SSD PM800, an i7 CPU Q820 with 8 gigs of RAM, win7 64 bit, an Nvidia Quadro FX 1800M, 1920 screen with a blueray burner, camera, lit keyboard, bio & smartcard..WEI of 6.6. I tried to fill it up with everything within reason to make work quicker. My kids like to watch the blueray Avatar on this thing because it looks better than the big 60 inch TV.. go figure. It renders video so freakin' fast; I've had it for 6 months or more I think and I am still amazed at seeing all the cores at work and getting stuff done in 30 minutes in what used to take days. In fact, I find myself not touching any of the other computers in my house or even my computer at work!

anyways, enough rambling. I need some more mobile HDD space and I was wondering if there is a slot inside this for a second 256 SSD or is my only choice using the space where the blueray burner is?

If there is no internal option... what is the FASTEST communication method with an external SSD that would be powered by the laptop on this machine? Looks like an eSATA type port on the left which I believe would need power... and a Firewire "1394" port on the right which would not need external power. Am I correct to assume that firewire has higher sustained speeds than a usb2 drive?

thanks for input on this.

 

I feel you.. my laptop just got better than my desktop..

to answer your question: there is no additional hdd space inside. the only 2nd you can have if by using the optical drive bay from like newmodeus which you prob heard about. i heard people doing speed test and reported that the optical bay sata connection delivers the full speed so ssd should work perfectly fine.

i asked a question before whether raid 0 is possible, but i think the answer was probably no. so that is that.

if u are gonna use it as storage, just get like 500gb hdd on that additional optical bay. for you, raid 0 wouldnt make sense since you might wanna use the bluray (without having to hook it up externally of course)