Precision M4600 Owners Lounge

personally i think you should get an mSATA SSD instead of a normal SSD. THat way you can keep your 500GB drive as a media storage drive and use the mSATA SSD as a boot/application drive

 

the price only gets ridiculous if you go for options like the extreme cpu and 16gb of ram, bluray drive etc. not to mention even if you do go for those extras, dell will normally increase the amount of discount they give you.

personally i love the screen. check out my screenshots here:

i used the scaling in firefox and in word you always have standard ms office zoom. who needs ui elements like the minimize and close button huge anyway

http://forum.notebookreview.com/dell-latitude-vostro-precision/343303-m4400-wuxga-vista.html

 

Dell has decided that laptops are now HDTV televisions. Thus the 16:9 screens and the 1080 and 720 (768) mode displays. If these were computers instead of televisions (a little sarcasm here), then our choices would have been 1440x900 and 1690x1050 on a 16:10 screen.

1368x768 is perfectly acceptable on the laptop for mobile use. I use a larger external monitor for any work performed at my desk. For those of you who don't already know, one can have a dual display setup with different screen resolutions as long as the external monitor is set as the primary display.

igraf

 

i definitely prefer 1920x1050 to 1690x1050, although i'd rather my old WUXGA resolution of 1920x1200

at first the squashed screen really annoyed me but now i'm somewhat used to it. sad, 16:10 really was the ideal.

 

A loaded M4600 is one of the most expensive Windows-based laptops on the market.

igraf

 

Me too! Especially for writing code. R.I.P. 16:10

Though I'll admit I've found the numpad to be a pretty useful side effect of 16:9.

 

I've read a lot of posts on here saying the battery life sucks compared to the W520 especially with the ATI card. What kind of battery life would I be expecting with an i7-2720QM and the Quadro 2000M?

I read one review of the W520 where the guy said he got 6.5-7 hrs on that notebook and one on here of someone with the M4600 with the Quadro 2000M that got just over 10 hrs so they sound fairly comparable.

 

the battery life sucks for sure with the ATI card. i get 3.5-4 hours with the 97wh battery. the guys with the quadros seem to be getting 8-9 with the 97wh battery.


i hope dell comes out with a fix. as discovered by another forumer the ati card dosent seem to throttle down when idle....

 

With the IPS screen and Quadro 2000M, I only get around 3 hours using the 97 Wh battery. Bummer

 

I should also mention that I would not be getting the IPS screen. It's a $400 option and the thing is already over the $2k mark in my config so I'm hoping the regular one will still be good.