Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

Hello,
I'am write form Italy and I want order precision m4500 with core i-7.
I'am a developper user and I use visual studio 2008 for all the day. I like usually high resolution and I'd like the FHD+ with 1900x1080 but I don't now if is VERY SMALL for 15,6". Now I have a d630 with 14" and 1400x900 but is too big for me. Can I have some screenshot with browser, word, and other programs open in FDH+ resolution to valutate the resolution? I have see only 1600 screenshot.
Many thanks and sorry for my english.

Axel

 

They are in price.

 

Choosing between a 8540w/M4500 and a unibody MBP is like choosing between a Hyundai Genesis and a BMW 3 Series.... IMO, not a very hard choice.

 

So the BMW is the MBP??? What do you have against BMW?

 

LOL, nothing. A titanium silver BMW makes a great matched set with a MBP.

Ok, now back the regular schedule programming.

 

The 15" MBP definitely is sexier than the M4500, but for the same price I get a better graphics system in the M4500 along with a few bells-and-whistles. Plus, I know I'll never have a problem running Windows on the Dell.

I think I'll try a fingerprint reader. Any reason to choose the FIPS-compliant model over the swipe kind? I haven't found good advice online about this.

 

Anyone know how the screens compare on the M4500 and the Studio XPS 16?

 

BIOS A02 is out (sort of)
ftp://ftp.us.dell.com/bios/M4500A02.exe

I didn't find any release information or changelog but these are the things I noticed:
1) brightness setting now works (YES!)
2) linux is now able to hibernate to ram correctly (double YES!)

Before installing you must first apply the patch (P01) available on dell site

 

Has anyone upgraded to 8GB memory outside of dell? What memory did you end up going with?

 

Other than the fact that neither the P01 patch nor the BIOS update worked on my machine this is nice.

In my case, when applying either of the patches from Win7x64, the update would go through the motions, and reboot the machine, but the BIOS was never modified. I had to do some serious fiddling to cobble together a DOS boot disk and apply the patch/update from there. Great job, Dell...

P.S.: The BIOS for this machine still seems kind of botched in general: Getting into the setup is somewhat hit-or-miss (it never displays a prompt to press the F2 key, and if you don't press the key at the right time you won't get into the setup), and sometimes exiting the BIOS setup shuts down the machine entirely, including the hard drive. The computer will turn on by itself after that, but this complete shutdown is entirely unnecessary, and doesn't exactly enhance the life of your components, in particular your hard drive. Oh well, maybe a dozen revisions or so down the road Dell might have gotten around to fix those issues, too...