Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

I've recently had a problem with my m4600.

I noticed that my battery was no longer charging. I keep the machine plugged in the majority of the time, but I noticed that the battery was at 48% even though it had been plugged in all day. The battery indicator gave the message "plugged in, not charging".

This seems to be quite a common issue with Dell machines, but I've not seen any reference to it happening on other m4600 types.

The machine was an outlet machine, I bought it 16 months ago. The battery health was rated as "excellent".

Tried all sorts, updated bios, played with power management, looked to see if battery charges in BIOS. Tried removing battery, holding down power button for 45 seconds to drain all power. Nothing worked.

I phoned Dell support. They asked me to confirm a couple of things I'd already tried. The decided to sent an engineer out to replace the motherboard. This happened the next day, but didn't solve the problem.

Dell support phoned back the next day and continued troubleshooting. They got me to go into bios and keep the machine on until the battery fully drained. Then restart. The battery did start recharging but then stopped at 6%. We tried this several times.The power adaptor was being recognised in BIOS, but the battery state said "idle" rather than "charging".

After this, the tech took control of my machine remotely and downloaded an updated Dell power management utility. Tried re-removing the power management driver from Device Manager and eventually said that he would send out a replacement battery.

The replacement battery has fixed the problem

Now, being more than 12 months old, I was worried that the battery wouldn't be covered by the warranty. I was warned this was the case when the motherboard was sent out but was pleasantly surprised when they agreed to send out a new battery without charge.

As far as I was concerned, this "fault" wasn't a result of battery wear and tear in the sense of a battery being a consumable - but was rather the failure of some part. I was all geared up for a big argument with them over this point but thankfully it wasn't necessary. The level of support I got was very good. A million times better than the Dell support I experienced with a consumer machine several years ago.

I'm sort of curious as to what would have caused this - somewhere I saw speculation about the failure of a chip inside the battery that identifies it as a genuine Dell one. Is that the case?

 

there is a charge controller board inside the battery that seems to stop working and the battery stops charging.

I pulled apart a few different batteries over the years and found the cells were all still good, it was the controller board that crapped out.

some laptops in the past also had battery recalibration software that sometimes would correct the battery charge issues but don't see that as often today.

There only been a few times that I have seen a issue with a cell inside the battery, that usually is a more fatal result.

 

I'm guessing that must of been the case with mine. Still - other than that my m4600 is going strong - happy with the purchase

 

I am looking into adding a secondary ssd to my laptop (m4600). Does anybody know if the optical bay is sata 6 (if it's suited for full ssd transfer)?

 

The only SATA-3 (6 gbps) port in the M4600 is the primary drive bay. The rest of the ports are SATA-2.

That said, you can still stick an SSD in there and have it perform fine. (Way better than a HDD would anyway.)

 

thank you!

 

Or get an mSATA drive and put it in the WWAN socket if you don't want to add a WiMAX or 3G card, then you get to keep the Optical bay. I got a Crucial CT256M4SSD3.

 

I have 3 SSD drives The one in the optical bay is raided with the Sata III drive port, and have a 256GB msata for backup files etc.

Raid speeds are decent enough

 

Hello all,

Have anyone tried upgrade to Windows 8.1 Preview of their M4600?

I had upgraded this morning and found problems with no Brightness Control and no access Fingerprint reader, eventhough no driver fault found at Device Manager.

Thanks you, and hopefully someone had upgraded and will like to share your experiences.

 

No fingerprint reader on M6700 with Windows 8.1.

For brightness control, (assuming you are using NVIDIA+Optimus) try reinstalling the Intel GPU drivers from Dell's site.