Precision M6400 Owner's Lounge *Part 2*

UPDATE: I think I found a fix. There is a Microsoft hot fix for drives being lost coming out of hibernation. Long story short, with larger drives, spin up time takes longer. When the drive didn't spin up in the allowed time, windows would basically drop the drive and you would have to reboot to see it again. The hotfix appears to have extended the time allowed for the spin up. I'll ge the KB number Monday and post it. I left it at work.

 

Hi again,
I got a friend with an M6400 and wants to upgrade the ram.The computer comes with 2GB of ram in 2 sticks.What he wants is to upgrade to at least 4gb.Is it better 2x2gb or 1x4gb sticks?.Also which brand and type is the right one for the M6400?
Thanks again

Cheers.

 

The M6400 supports up to 16 GB of ram. What I have is 4x2 GB for a total of 8 GB. There are four slots for ram. Going full 16 GB is a little too much of money at the moment for me (and I don't see the need yet). I am pretty sure you have to install ram in pair. The M6400 supports ram of DDR3 which has speed of 1066 Mhz. Look for notebook ram and check latency. It should be good practice to get a match set.
Some expert should chime in more.

 

Thnks a lot.
I´d appreciate any help choosing the ram brand.
any ideas?

Thanks

 

the dell page........
http://accessories.euro.dell.com/sna/category.aspx?c=uk&l=en&s=dhs&cs=ukdhs1&category_id=4325&mfgpid=1619426&chassisid=-1
you can find it cheaper though

 

I should and probably will post this in the hardware or some other section but since this is my first resort for questions you saw it here first!.......

I use the Acronis cloning tool as my main backup, I know, I know..but that's how I like it, so does anyone know if there's a 'best way' to clone back and forth between a magnetic disk and my SSD? Been doing it for a long while and my Samsung SSD is still running at surprisingly close to it's original specs. Should I just overwrite it or is there a better procedure for doing it? I used to do a quick format each time but everything says that's a bad thing and seeing that you're here Barn, and maybe Airblazer is still around & maybe someone else knows more than I do.. ...any suggestions?

And does anyone have enough experience to recommend a 128 or so GB MLC drive for me to try? I'm not going to seriously put money into a new drive for 6 months or so and will probably stick with SLC when I do but the MLCs are cheap enough and the read/write speeds are twice what my now 'old' Samsung is, so....again, any suggestions?
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Precision Covet | QX9300 | 4GB 1066 | 64GB Samsung SLC SSD & 320GB Seagate | XP Pro 32bit & Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

 

@gulfstreamtec
I can't really comment about the Acronis with SSD etc... but I bought my 6400 with the Dell 128GB SSD which is a samsung and have been very happy with it. They are also pretty resonable from a $$ point of view. There are others that are much better in terms of performance, but you pay for it. As far as a recommendation, I hear the Intel X25's are the best.

@gulfstreamtec - UPDATE - I found a good blog on the acronis question..

http://yourbeholder.blogspot.com/2009/12/windows-7-how-to-create-aligned.html

 

It must have been really late because my post is incoherent. There's no problem with Acronis and never has been, though it sounds that way. My implication was supposed to be what is the best way to use it as a constant clone target. And I've been told before that Dells SSDs are all Samsung but in the U.S. parts catalogue most have a case with an indented (or recessed?) place in the center that doesn't look Samsungish compared to the one out of 33 they offer in laptop sized drives. And the one that does look just like mine (brushed finish and smooth surface) might be the same 64GB SLC I have now except that they don't give any details on any of them. The SLC format must be better because the complaints run about 99 to 1 against the MLC design and the exact reverse with a SLC one. Which is really confusing when you really dig into it because with the case opened I can't see any obvious difference between the two. No speeds listed or anything else and 14 different 128GB models that all look identical. I did the 'compare products' option and it looked pretty stupid with all these drives listed which, going by the info Dell provides are all exactly the same. They have one or two 80GB models too, and isn't it Intel and/or OCZ that build in that size? Samsung doesn't sell retail and I bought an OEM job that has more details on the friggin label than Dell has on their drives page.

You're not the first or only to recommend the Intel drives and there's a good chance that's the way I'll go. But at this time the difference between the read/write numbers is sort of wide compared with OCZ and some other label that I think is just rebranded Intel. The beauty of having the two drives is that a dedicated OS drive doesn't need to be that big, in my case anyway. With my 100 plus gig My Document folder on drive 2 I'm using less than half my 64gig OS drive. I'm only going up to 128 because of the MLC pricing of them. I'd really like the 128GB OCZ SLC job except it has a $1200 price tag. But I could get by with 64gigs The reason I'm starting to look is that some drives are getting built in garbage collection, or TRIM if you're into acronyms because 'securely erasing' one is a complicated mess. And when asked, Samsung had no other suggestions than use that one difficult as hell to run Secure Erase program.
____________________
Precision Covet | QX9300 | 4GB 1066 | 64GB Samsung SLC SSD & 320GB Seagate | XP Pro 32bit & Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

 

The Unisys guy came by today with the replacing the lcd back cover and the bezel and well it didn't go so well but it wasn't his fault, the battery and the power connector out of course, and well the lcd wouldn't turn on due to the the new lcd back cover had some other type of connectors i know weird... Well it got fried, computer is just fine, just no rgb led right, i said to myself my paper! NO!! Its fine just, i just have to use an external monitor but i will just use the M17x now until tomorrow or so, see why its good to have more than one machine, stupid consumers lol, i am getting a new screen by tomorrow or so.

 

Hmm.. After watching MKV's for about 5 minutes they seem to slow down and get jerky. Anyone experience that issue?

XP, 20GB HD free, 4GB Ram, not much CPU useage.
Nvidia Graphics Card: Quadro FX 3700M v 6.14.11.7976

maybe i'll need to get a better driver on laptopvideo2go? been there - so much information.. i got a little overwhelmed didnt know if i should mess with it.

ummm, thanks

Veni