Precision M4500 Owner's Lounge

Well I've identified what is causing the cursor jitter
It's the Dell Control Point SECURITY MANAGER.

As soon as I uninstalled it, I had no more stutter with the cursor.
I then reinstalled it, it re-appears.

Matalachancha - You will not lose any data with a BIOS upgrade - it simply updates the BIOS part of your system. You should also not lose any settings and everything will stay the same - I did A01 > A01 Patch > A03. I probably didn't need to do the patch but it was more out of curiosity.

Did not see an A02 on their site so no idea what that update had that A01 didnt.

 

aj84: did you notice any improvement of performance in your laptop after de upgrade?

 

I don't use photoshop, but no freezes/lockups.

A03
Win 7 x64
Core i7
FX 880M

I rebuilt my M4500 from scratch on day 1, installing only the latest drivers and not installing the applications which accompany the drivers (where possible). Dell Control Point is not installed.

It has been very stable for the first month under A01. Recently upgraded to A03; still seems very stable. Also upgraded to the A04 R269801 multi-touchpad driver on Dell's support site; now it works well.

 

Bios upgrades generally do not change the performance of the laptop/pc in question. It usually fixes issues/bugs or adds/removes functionality.

For example, in one update, there may not be the ability to boot from USB and another, there would be.

In this case, the Patch did the following:
1. Corrects an issue with the A01 BIOS which prevents the successful updating of the Intel Manageability Engine firmware.
2. Addresses a flash update issue under 64-bit operating systems.

This patch must be applied to the A01 BIOS in order to upgrade to A02 and beyond. Systems with the A02 BIOS or greater do not need to apply this patch.


A03 then did:
Note: If your system currently has the A01 BIOS installed, you must install the P02 patch before upgrading to this BIOS.

1. Added support for newer versions of Intel processors.
2. Updated the PXE option ROM to version 1.3.52.1.
3. Updated the manageability engine firmware to version 6.1.0.1042.
4. Added support for Encrypted Hard Drives.
5. Addressed flash update issue under 64-bit operating systems.



Usually it's pre-OS that a BIOS upgrade would benefit/affect but there are times it has fixed windows functionality/issues etc.

Hope this helps!

 

I've just finished rebuilding the M4500 and this time, not installing the control point security module (but installing the security drivers). I do have the system manager installed and apart from that known screen flash on boot because of it, the system so far touch wood is very stable.

I can now say that the stuttering cursor was caused by the control point security module and will drop dell a mail about this as without it, it does render the fingerprint control useless.

 

Well, enoughs enough! Mine is going back - just contacted the guy who sorted this out for me so I'll see what he says.

Going back based on the following:

1. Delivered 6 days early - Why? Was this someone elses return or genuinly delivered in time?

2. two marks at the front indicating it has been opened or something.

3. No film over the plastics. My M4400 had it but this doesnt...may be normal on this model but I won't know unless someone here confirms this?

Now the main bits:

4. Got no bootable device found out of the blue. Restarting got it back up into windows.

5. Horrible click noise on rebooting from the drive. M4400 has identical drive which does not make this sound.

6. CHKDSK out of the blue came up wanting to scan the drive along with Chrome at one point saying it could not write to c:\downloads due to it being corrupt!

7. Anytime I open Control Point or the Intel storage manager etc, the system locks for 30mins at a time. Once the app loads, then it's perfectly fine but this is not normal.

8. Security Manager installed = stuttering mouse. Uninstall = fine but no fingerprint sensor usage.

9. Fingerprints/Grease on the inside of the laptop on day1 of opening the box - I doubt Dell would be that silly indicating possible return from another person.


I've rebuilt the laptop 3 times now and still it's not feeling like an updated model of my M4400 and while the CPU is faster, it does not feel it. I know I mentioned above it was stable but this is what has started to happen over the last few hours I've been building the drive up.

Have stated given I've spend £1500 on a laptop, I expect a brand new laptop not second hand. I am happy with a solution of a replacement brand new laptop but if they can't/won't, I'll take a full refund and go elsewhere.

Will keep you updated!

 

This is pretty unfortunate aj84, maybe they will send you a replacement.

My seagate 7200.4 makes a strange ping noise when the bios loads, but seems fine any other time.
I didn't get any protective film over my plastics, and never have with any dell notebook.

I like the screen on my M4400 a lot more [16:10 aside] the 1600x900LG has a strong pink hue to everything, even with the red gamma reduced a lot.
The screen hinges on my new M4500 feel about 2/3rds as stiff as my 20 month old M4400, which is a bit bizzare, and I'm not a huge fan of i5-540 heat, particularly the high idle temps compared to a slightly faster c2d X9100, apart from that I'm pretty stoked with the performance and improvements made in detailing, cooling, speakers, screen/palmrest etc

 

I have tried some games so far, and dissapointing that i have some lag issues with my laptop. Eventhough Fx 1800 is a proffesional gpu was expecting better gaming performance from it.
Is there a way to increase its gaming performance, and suggestions

 

Can you post some benchmark results? I am thinking about selling my E6500 with NVS 160M and getting M4500 with Fx 1800.

 

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU Q 820 @ 1.73GHz 7.1 5.9
Memory (RAM) 4.00 GB 7.5
Graphics NVIDIA Quadro FX 1800M 6.6
Gaming graphics 2426 MB Total available graphics memory 6.6
Primary hard disk 43GB Free (93GB Total) 5.9

WEI is here if it helps