Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

Thank you! I noticed that you have a Dell Precision M4800. Do you know if the Dell Wireless 1550 module is compatible with the M4600? The Dell Support page says the driver only works on the Latitude 3330 and Precision M4800/M6800 but I'm curious if the BIOS in the M4600 will allow the newer Wifi card.

EDIT: I contacted Dell Tech Support and they said the Dell Wirelss 1550 card is compatible with the M4600 even though the driver page doesn't say it does.

 

All of the Precisions (M4xxx/M6xxx at least) will take pretty much whatever wifi card you put in, there are no BIOS restrictions. On the driver page, they only show models that actually shipped with the card.

 

Awesome! I have another question haha. Do you know if the M4600 powers directly from the outlet when the charger is plugged in? I don't want the battery to be charging when it's already at 100% and the AC adapter is plugged in.

 

Of course it does, it would be pretty poor design otherwise, you should be able to set the charging threshold for the battery most likely as well.

 

Very cool! I'll have to look into that. My old HP would continue to charge with the battery already at 100% and it demolished the battery life. I was not aware that laptop manufacturers had already included this "smart charging" feature in 2011.

 

Thinkpads have had the ability to set custom charging thresholds for forver, Asus notebooks have stopped charging at 100% and wouldn't charge again until the battery hit 95% charge since at least 2009. Most manufacturers have been at least half decent at nor constantly charging the battery. Custom charging thresholds are rarer though and not every battery Dell has allows for it. The 97 Whr models usually do, but the lower capacity models on Precisions don't.

 

Some users have reported that the custom battery thresholds in the Precision (at least M4700/M6700) doesn't work. (i.e., if you plug the machine in, it will charge the battery until it gets to 100%, no matter what you set the custom threshold to.) I haven't tested this myself. Even so, you shouldn't have the issue where your battery continues to charge after it reaches 100%.

There are lots of options for the battery in the BIOS. I set mine to "primarily AC use" which I believe caps the charge around 90%. (The battery will actually last longer in the long run if you don't fully charge it every time; however, naturally you get less time to use the system away from the outlet if you don't charge it all the way.) In any case, you should disable the "express charge" feature which is on by default if you care about battery longevity.

 

question all..

I have 2 8gb pc3-1600 sticks in my m4600 i7 quad core. A16 bios. It is only recognizing them as 4gb sticks. Anyone having this issue? driving me nuts!

 

Hi all, new here and new to the M4600. I ordered a Refurbished unit primarily to store and edit photos while on vacation and want to upgrade the ram and hard drives.

Ram is easy but I can't seem to find an answer regarding the mSata Hard Drive. I did some searching here as well as a ton of google searches and didn't find a clear answer.

Is the max capacity of the mSata 128gb or is that all you can configure it with when you order a new machine? Reason I ask is I'd like to install 2 drives in Raid 0 and they need to be the same capacity. I'd like to use 256gb dives but not sure if the mSata will support anything larger than 128gb.

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

Any mSATA should work (even 1 TB).