Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

Apparently not. What does it take to be a Premier member?

 

I would consider asking your rep, because I'm not entirely certain. The account is through my employer.

 

I tried also few days ago on the euro.dell premier chat and this what they said:

 

Ok, I worry too much....

Anyway, I called Dell about the squeaky ENTER key and they sent me a replacement. Indeed, the procedure is easy as pie.

I didn't expect to see the fan directly beneath the keyboard ; but this is convenient since I was worried about dust/cig smoke ; which I didn't see there fortunately.

Too be sure I sprayed some compressed air in there too clean it.

Here some pics of the replacement procedure :

http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc167/knotje/KNOT3D/P5183762.jpg

http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc167/knotje/KNOT3D/P5183754.jpg

http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc167/knotje/KNOT3D/P5183763.jpg

http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc167/knotje/KNOT3D/P5183760.jpg

http://i217.photobucket.com/albums/cc167/knotje/KNOT3D/P5183765.jpg

 

Has anyone tried Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 and the Mercury Playback Engine fix to test the Quadro 880M. People are saying that basically any card over 798mb ram work with this trick and I was curious if the M4500 worked. If someone could report back it would be awesome. You can test with the demo also.

Premiere CS5 – Mercury GPU Acceleration on the cheap

 

Finally, my short armature review of the M4500. I decided to go get a new Linksys E3000 Router while I was charging my battery. What a disaster! I’ll save that for another post. First impressions: Solid laptop. Love the backlit keyboard. Screen res. is nice (1600x900 HD+). 9 cell sticks out of the back about ¾ inches, small price to pay for extra battery life. Feels “warm”, not hot, but some heat from the keyboard and palm rests. Key board does have some “give” or “flex”, not much but somewhat noticeable. Overall I am happy with it. I’m going to install Solidworks and see how the graphics run with the NVIDIA and CPU.

 

So were all hearing positives. I havnt been able to read all the comments yet but to summarise:
Pros:

• performance from kit especially if you can afford to beef it up.
• it looks professional.

Negs:

• 9 cell battery comes out the backside.
• no USB 3.0 ports.

Correct me if I've missed anything.

Also I spoke to Dell earlier and they said a USB 3.0 version is due to be launched but couldn't confirm a date

 

I had one other question can the multi touch track pad be configured similar to the M64/6500 for use as a shuttle wheel in Premiere Pro etc?

 

I notice my M4500 hard disk has some sort of heart beat access activity every minute or so. Its preventing the drive from spinning down after 30 minutes of inactivity (per my power plan settings).

It seems some service is writing to a lastalive1.dat file in the c:\windows\serviceprofiles\localservice\appdata\local folder.

Maybe the event viewer service...

Googling this, I found some have edited this registry key to stop the heart beat:

======================

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Reliability

Set the value of TimeStampInterval to 0 (zero)

OR

Set the value of TimeStampInterval to the maximum.

======================


Anyone on this forum know about this?

Thanks in advance.

 

FWIW, I updated my "impressions" post in this thread, post #373.

Maybe this link will work:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/del...ision-m4500-owners-lounge-38.html#post6231718