Recommend M4600? Has it been good to you?

Thanks Jutti, I'm aware of msata, I'm an IT guy. I'm used to carrying 15+" notebooks around, the M4600 is pretty close in size and weight(at least on paper) to the W520(which is only slightly heavier-due to the larger power brick, than my current T500 that I lug around).

Interesting about the IPS issues. I've always tried to get IPS due to viewing angles more than color reproduction(of course that's the main reason), but that's good to know, color shifting would be annoying.

I agree, Dell's keyboards were great, I don't know how the new chiclet styles ones are(on the newer E-series), but the previous E-series I used (e6500/6510) were great, they did their homework on thinkpad's and almost one upped them on feel/feedback.

 

I went through sound stutter problems with my m17x R1, took a few BIOS updates and chipset driver updates to finally fix the issue

have you reported this issue to Dell tom ?

 

Dell came out and replaced the motherboard and daughterboard today... audio skipping and high dpc latency spikes are still there.. Tried all the bios versions .. A01 to A10.. all with the same results.

 

I just ran DPC latency checker on my m4600 running newest drivers and A10 bios - for about 30 mins. no workload on cpu though, just moderate web browsing.
result: no dropouts. however, there are a few spikes that do get close to the yellow line. When playing youtube songs, spikes definitely increased but stayed below yellow. I can very well imagine dropouts (ever so slightly) under cpu load.

With my old bios and Dell-factory windows installation I very well had many yellow spikes.

 

ran the DPC tester on my config no issues recorded.

I been thunking it maybe an issue with the NVIDEA cards as it was with the m17x I had.

Be curious to start a new thread tom and see if any others have this problem.

 

I had the audio dropout problem with high dpc latency spikes. When i changed the power plan from Balanced to High performance, it went away. Try changing the power plan and see if it helps.

 

Do me a favor and play some video from today.com and watch your DPC latency.. let me know if you get any major spikes, maybe it's something to do with this website.. I notice it mostly while watching the news every morning.