Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

You are pretty much describing what I go through with my Sammy 64 mSATA. I'm tired of fooling with it, I'm going to sell the freaking thing and go to a sandybridge lappy....

 

I have the Samsung mSATA drive, but no boot problems. Things you might want to verify:

- BIOS A08 on your M4500?
- latest firmware on your Samsung?
- are there any USB storage devices connected? Even a Kindle can sometimes confuse the boot process on the M4500 and you get messages like "no boot device" or a Windows message like "cannot find bootmgr". The frustrating thing is that this seems to be random, maybe depending on which device posts earlier.

Both the Samsung firmware and BIOS are available from the Dell website, of course. Be sure to clone your mSATA card before flashing, you will erase all data. Good choices to do this would be Clonezilla or Acronis Trueimage.

A possible workaround if the problems stay:

- On whatever drive you have in your main HDD bay, make room for a small partition (about 150 MB should be plenty). Install GRUB to that partition (many guides available, be sure that you choose the right GRUB version for the instructions you follow - either GRUB 0.97 or GRUB 1.97 and later). There are "SUPER GRUB" disks and Linux Live CDs around to help with this, too.

- Then let BIOS just boot the 2.5" drive and have GRUB chainload into the Windows bootloader. If you run no other OS on your machine, you can set this to be menu-less and instantaneous.

I mostly boot this way (2.5" SSD with Ubuntu, mSATA SSD with Windows 7) and have had no problems. If I decide to boot the mSATA drive from the boot menu, that works just as well.

 

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time, very informative!

Yes, I have the latest BIOS, but am not sure about the firmware, I actually updated it when I switched systems, but I couldn't tell you if it was the newest.

As for the rest of it? Yes I have various USB storage devices plugged in now and again - but I can't really tie the boot issues to any particular device as it happens with and without them plugged in. (that was actually the thing I chased)

Don't get me wrong, I appreciate the suggestion - but I don't like the system enough to jump though GRUB hoops, it should just work... not like I have these problems with my desktops.

Again, thanks a bunch, you shed some light on it for me.

 

Has anybody managed to put two 8 GB dimms into a Dell M4500? It is possible (though very expensive) to buy Samsung 8GB dimms (1333 MHz, 204 pin) that are of the same form as the 4GB dimms that Dell uses in the M4500. Dell uses these in the M4600. The question is, will they work in the M4500? There's not much info out there, but most of it indicates that the M4500 doesn't go beyond 8GB in total. I'm not sure whether this is because Dell never shipped the M4500 with more than 8GB total or whether it is a hard limit imposed by the motherboard and/or processor. If anyone has a defintive answer to this question, I'd appreciate it.

 

Hello guys. I was pretty active for awhile in this thread until I sold off my machine.

I got the M4500 again from the outlet for $620 pretax with the 20% off... It was a great deal. Specs on my sig.

is there any issue right now that is popular and not solved? I dont really feel like reading the previous 50 pages.

Glad to join back the family.

 

Be sure you have BIOS A08, fixes a number of issues. Other than that, check that your boot process works EVERY time, there seem to be some boot post issues. Also, if you have too many active storage devices at boot time, strange things tend to happen.

Just try to connect two eSATA drives and two internal drives at the same time for some fun...

 

Looking for a good USB to DVI converter to add a 3rd monitor to my M4500 since QuadroFX 1800M GPU can't handle more than 2 monitor
Anyone has experience or suggestions?

 

there's the rgbled panel for this laptop ?

on ebay i found it...but on the configurator i never seen...

Dell Precision M4500 ISV Laptop i7-840QM,8GB,500GB,Quadro FX 1800M,DVDRW,RGB LED | eBay

 

Hi,
a tip about the right driver for the 880M for my M4500. I understood that the drivers provided by Dell are generally obsolete and therefore it's better to look at the website of the video card producer. Well, on the Nvidia website there are basically three options:

1. VERDE driver 280.26 (released on 08/09/2011);
2. partner certified driver 189.18 for AutoCAD 2011 (no release date);
3. performance driver (no version number) for AutoCAD 2011 (released on 02/04/2011).

​

What's then the best driver to run AutoCAD 2011 and higher versions? Furthermore, why are the first two drivers much larger than the third one (170-180 MB vs. 4 MB)?
Thank you in advance!

 

Over at Dell, there is a new BIOS version available for the M4500. Version is A09, dated 20 Oct 2011.

Fixes & Enhancements: "1. Added support of Signed Firmware BIOS. 2. Fixed fail to create or change Hard Drive password from DDPA 2.0. 3. Addressed FDE hard drive detection issue. 4. Fixed USB data transfer issue lockup with iTunes application. 5. Updated the PXE option ROM to version 1.3.76"

There is a note stating that you need to update to A09 in order to update to any future firmware version. It also states that you cannot upgrade from A01 to A09 without applying the P02 patch first.