Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

I run a 240gb msata with Windows on it, and a 2.5 inch 128gb ssd with Linux mint on it. I wouldn't want to run a platter drive as I don't need the storage or the drain on my battery

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

 

So, I bought an M4500 (eBay, of course), and this seems to be the place to discuss the thing. I'm replacing an ~10-year-old Inspiron 6000d which I bought new and which still works fine, but is simply getting too long enough in the tooth to be a bother for the things I use it for that make me money.

The M4500 hasn't shipped yet, but I'm in a hurry to get it running to modern-ish standards and want to minimize my pain (I only want to install the OS once). I purposely bought one with an I5, the slower of the two video options (because either is light-years beyond what I'm used to having in a laptop and 3D graphics don't make me any money), and a blank hard drive, because the dollars made sense.

I've read through the last few years of this thread.

Questions:

1. There seems to be a lack of consensus on whether or not the machine will accept 16GB of RAM, and it seems to depend on the particular CPU. Some folks seem to indicate that quad-cores are good for 16GB while dual-cores are not, but all of the newer I7 CPUs supported are dual-core. WTF? Are older, less power-inefficient quad-core I7 CPUs (Clarksfield) better at managing lots of RAM than newer dual-core I7s (Arrandale)? Can anyone here tell me that they're running 16GB of RAM on a dual-core machine (and if so: what RAM? What CPU? Which stepping?
   • Is anyone, specifically, using 16GB of RAM on an I5?
2. I've seen various issues about boot order and the machine being fickle about multiple storage devices. Can the machine boot and be happy with only an mSATA drive, with nothing at all installed in the 2.5" SATA slot? Has anyone actually used it in this configuration? ~250GB mSATA SSDs from Micron and Samsung are around $100 right now, and that's plenty of storage for my needs -- and far faster than the interface on the M4500 itself can transfer.
3. Docking. Docking stations for these things are cheap on Ebay (go look!), and I can see certain advantages to that. How has the venerable M4500 stood up in terms of regular docking/undocking?
4. Windows 10. I like Windows 10. Dell's support site is clear in saying that they don't care and won't support it, but I don't care what Dell says when buying a used computer. Has anyone here upgraded their M4500 to Windows 10? How did you (or it) fare? I see that nVidia has a driver update from June for this old Quadro...

Thanks in advance for sharing your experience, and I'll be sure to update this thread as I perform various upgrades.

 

Alrighty:

1: the CPU contains the memory controller. AFAIK, the first gen I series dual cores only support ddr3-1066, and 8 gigs. The quad cores from the same generation support ddr3-1333 and up to 16gigs.

2:I am not using 16 gigs on an i5, but am using 8gigs

3:boot order. I have no issues here. I run both a 120gb Samsung 470 SSD in the 2.5 slot, with Linux, and a 240gb msata drive with Windows 10 (was windows 7, just upgraded).

4:Windows 10, I have not had any issues with it, but I did an in place upgrade from a windows 7 install. All my fn keys work fine, and I am pretty happy with the results thus far.

I use the laptop for school, Linux for coding, windows for most other things.

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

 

Excellent, thanks bluefalcon13!

If I might ask again: Is it easy for you to disconnect the 2.5" SATA drive and verify that that the machine will happy boot from mSATA? Or, specifically: Have you ever successfully used the machine with just the mSATA as the solitary storage device? I've seen reports (elsewhere) that this doesn't work.

I only ask because at this point, I'm hoping to be getting rid of the hard drive altogether and going with a new Samsung mSATA SSD exclusively (thus leaving the 2.5" bay open if I ever need/want to store Big Things on spinning rust), and this machine seems to be from the near-infancy of mSATA.

 

I have not tried that, but I will in a few hours after the kiddos are in daycare.

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

 

So about a month+ late, but I know for a fact I booted with no drive in the 2.5 inch slot the other day without issue.

Sent from my Nexus 6 using Tapatalk

 

Hello everyone,

I know I'm kinda late to the club, but I've recently acquired a M4500 and am still battling a couple of issues, some of which (or at least one I hope might get solved in this thread. Here's the collection:

#1 After exiting BIOS, my M4500 is always doing a hard "power off" (accompanied with the typical "ugly" sound). The event in itself obsiously isn't a major hassle (as I'm done with the initial setup, I'm unlikely to enter - or exit - the BIOS anytime soon). I'm simply curious about the reasons and want to make sure this isn't the symptom of some major hardware issue that will come to haunt me later on.

#2 I equipped my M4500 with a new Samsung 850 Evo SSD card (mSATA) - latest firmware. Everything is working well, except that, in the early (pre?)boot phase, the system is spending a lot of time talking to the drive. Before DELL's typical BIOS loading screen, I have around 5 seconds of black screen, with no HD lights on. After the screen, I also have five seconds of the same. After that, the HD light comes on, and the machine takes 15-20 seconds doing god-knows-what. But it's not even booting just yet, e.g. if I insert a regular drive in the HD bay, the system will only ask me *after* the 15-20 seconds which OS I'd like to boot. Of course, if I remove the SSD card, the 15-20 seconds are skipped. Does anyone have an idea why this is happening, and if there's a way around it?

#3 When coming back from energy saving mode (and btw. this is a Windows 10 system), my M4500 will crash reliably. In the end, I get a fairly brief "CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED" bluescreen, but it doesn't gather any data, so I can't do a crash dump analysis. Hybernation works fine, however, and wakes up without issues.

#4 In Windows 10, the system shows up as having two battery sockets. Clicking on the system tray icon will tell me that battery 1 isn't available, while battery 2 is doing just fine. The problem is that, with the imaginary battery 1 being unavailable, I also won't receive any popup notifications when I'm low on juice. Device manager shows two ACPI-compatible batteries. Searching the Net, I only found one guy with a similar issue, but no solution ( https://www.reddit.com/r/Windows10/comments/3ft6sr/windows_10_showing_batteries_that_do_not_exist/ ). Deactivating the right one will basically fix the issue, but I still find it rather odd and was wondering if this is a known issue with the M4500 or other Dell computers?

Thanks in advance!

 

#1 - My M6700 and M4800 both do this, I'd call it normal.
#4 - Also normal, you can get a second battery "slice" which attaches to the dock port on the bottom, that's why it shows a second battery socket.

 

#2 - Go into the BIOS and disable booting from the lan?

#3 - Don't use sleep... Hasn't worked reliably for me since 1995...

How much RAM do you have in your notebook? Even with only 8GB RAM, the hibernation file will use over 6GB... disable it and put it to better use.

 

Thanks for the replies.

#2 "Onboard NIC" is deselected as a booting device. I *think* I've also deselected any of these, but without success.
#3 Like I said, sleep (aka hibernation) works fine anyway (and I actually find it quite useful when I have to much stuff open but need to relocate). What's causing the issues is the energy saving mode (the status where the screen goes off, but the power button keeps blinking).