Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

That is what virtual machines are for.

I also happen to have a few remaining XP only applications - which run fine in a virtual XP machine under Ubuntu (I use VirtualBox, which would also be available for Windows 7).

Otherwise: good to know that it would work...

 

I bought a bunch of those caddies and they work ok. The lever that goes in and out when you push it and that is used to pull the caddy in and out is not as easy to use as the Dell caddies (e.g., the DVD drive caddy), but it can be made to work easily enough. I put 500GB Momentus XT 7200 RPM hybrid drives in the caddies and substitute them in and out for the DVD. These are great as an extra storage places or, in my case backup drives. (I have an Intel 310 80GB MinCard SSD as my O/S drive and a Momentus XT 500GB 7200RMP hybrid drive as my main data drive. These are both internal drives. In addition I use the modular bay with the NewmodeUS caddies for swapping in and out backup drives.) The caddies are hot swappable, and plug and play. When you first put a new one in with a fresh drive, you need to ready it using Windows 7: Computer Management->Storage->Disk Management. In the list of drives you will see the new drive come up as an unformatted drive. You need to create a new partition and then it's ready to go. This only takes half a minute or so.

I have had no heat issues with the extra drive in the modular bay. I do backups that take hours to run whilst doing other stuff with no problems. I think Dell do sell caddies with hard drives in them to go in the M4500 modular bay but they are low speed/capacity and a rip off. Much better getting a Momentus XT and a NewModeUS caddy.

Anyone know if there exists a modular battery to go in the modular bay?

 

I lost my Recovery partition due to a hard drive failure and had to reinstall everything from scratch on my M4500. I got it up and running alright but I don't have the original black wallpaper that came with it (Chrome but with the words "Precision" in it).

Can anybody please share it if you have it?

Thanks

 

What would it hook up to?

 

And speaking of losing this, is there anyway to order the factory Recovery data from Dell (even if paying some $)? Do you know? Just curious.

 

Dell Latitude and other laptops for many years had the option to purchase a modular battery that goes in the modular bay that normally houses the DVD drive or a second hard drive. Dell don't sell such a thing for the M4500, or, more generally, E-series. I like them because they give you more battery life and allow the main battery to be hot-swapped out as well. Windows can manage more than one battery.

 

Just noticed this:

Renice X3 120GB 50mm mSATA 3Gbps 120GB SSD Review - Smallest and Fastest SSD To Date! - The SSD Review

has come onto the market. Pretty expensive at $300 or so for 120 GB, but a great little drive to put your O/S onto. It seems to rate better than the Samsing and Intel mSata drives. I checked the retailer web site and they are currently out of stock, but this drive seems to be quite a recent release.

 

Considering what we paid for 64's I guess you would expect $300 for 120, but it is hard to swallow when you standard format SSDs are regularly found on specials in the $1/GB range these days.

@$200 I would be all over it.

Does anyone else have problems with their Samsung msata's causing their m4500 to hang on boot? Sometimes I have to power my system 3 or 4 times before it will boot.

I had the exact same problem with another m4500 and with a different msata drive

 

*NM, I just found AfhStingray's M4600 Owner's thread!

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Have any of you heard about the Precision M4600? Dsearches here on NBR and on Tom's turn up zilch!

I haven't cracked it open yet, but it seems like a beast of a machine (Core i7-2620M, 15.6" 1920x1080 fHD and switchable Intel/Nvidia Quadro 1000M w/2GB GDDR3).

Was this just released? Are they no longer mfr'g the M4400? Maybe I'll start an owner's thread.. Or maybe I'll sell it, its almost more than I need!

 

I just bought one of the Renice 120 GB mSATAs so I'll let people know how it goes putting it in. I've currently got the Intel 310 (80 GB) in there and I'm hitting limit with Win 7 and key apps and databases installed on it, so this will hopefully give me breathing space. There is an article suggesting that 600 GB mSATAs are on the way:

Intel SATA and mSATA SSD Roadmap Leaked - 600GB SSDs : Storage

To answer your question about booting from the mSATA, the answer is yes, I get problems sometimes where it won't reboot from it (either the Intel 310 I currently have or the 64 GB Samsung that shipped with my M4500). I have to go into the bios and fiddle around with boot seqences and sometimes have to do a few reboots to get it to go. This can happen after Windows does an update and forces a reboot. Every time this happens I worry that this will be it and I'll have to reinstall everything. So far it always comes back to life after a while. I haven't updated the bios since I got the rig, so I might try that. Aside from that, my insurance policy is to image my mSATA onto a standard 2.5" 7200 RPM drive and then I've got the option of slotting that into the modular bay (via a cady) and booting from that until I can sort out a new mSATA or something. It is very un-nerving.