[User Review] Dell Precision M4600 15.6" Mobile Workstation

[hireegy]

Yes, but I have no solution.

Same here, except the noise is far less loud than with my previous D830, so it does not bother me at all. Actually when the fan is off and the internal HDD stops spinning (because my system is on mini-card SSD), the computer becomes absolutely silent, if not for tiny electronic noises, hardly noticeable. I didn't even know it was possible...

about the weird battery problems, I have some results here, with optimus, through HWINFO64, on battery going down from 95% charge:

-Quadro 2000M on with optimus (optimus means the IGP is on too!): automatically at full frequencies, and 21W power draw at idle.
-quadro 2000M off, switch to IGP: 15-16w idle
-quadro 2000M off, small but persistent background task:...30W!

the task in question was my avast antivirus which had decided to scan a big 10GB file in background. It took it several minutes, but only 13% CPU overall load (i7 2720 QM) during which my power consumption almost doubled, because the 4 cores had decided to go turbo at 2.9 GHz (nominal frequency is 2.2 GHz) although the task only needed 13% of CPU load (so no "stress" here i would have guessed...). weird.

But still. It makes a very honorable 5 hours average battery life, shown by win7, for a mobile workstation, not a mere netbook, after all. And I have 2 97Wh batteries

[Figit090]

Hi everybody, I'm seriously considering this as a main photography workstation as I don't want to be tied down to a desktop PC... but looking at configurations I'm not sure I can afford to fully customize it off the bat. Is it a preferable idea to buy it without some upgrades and then buy separate components later on, like more ram, or a SSD drive?

I also noticed that when configuring two hard drives it says to select one as a mini-SSD but there are two 128gb ssd's and no "mini" option; the warning will not go away but i assume perhaps one of those should say mini next to it?

either way, can the m4600 have two hard drives, one mini and one 2.5", without using an optical drive bay HDD/SSD insert?

Also does anyone know what modifications can be made to this computer without voiding the warranty? I was thinking of getting the 5 year accidental warranty even at it's steep 500 dollar or more pricetag. Not sure what to do on that... :-/

[kael41]

Somehow my bios got corrupted and i can't enter into either F2 or F12. Does anyone have a graphic or can point me in the direction of a jumper I need to switch or connect in order to manually clear cmos on the 4600?

[KiloG]

Somehow my bios got corrupted and i can't enter into either F2 or F12. Does anyone have a graphic or can point me in the direction of a jumper I need to switch or connect in order to manually clear cmos on the 4600?

What did you change in BIOS? I changed boot order and SATA operation settings before (I have two hard drives installed) and could not enter into the settings with either F2 or F12 after that. I finally solved it by removing the mSATA drive and then I could enter BIOS again to reset the settings.

If you press and hold the Fn-button while starting the computer, you will enter a Diagnostic mode that might give some information.

[Lippenziaga]

Hi,

i want to buy a M4600, but i am not sure about the screen quality of the fullhd, because notebookcheck.com said the illumination is not to be optimal?

So my question to the fullhd owner, how is the quality of the screen? It should be a LGD209D MC6JN_156WF1.

What do you say about the illumination, are there problems in normal office use and in photoediting? How is contrast and black levels?

I think the 8560w has a little better display, the AUO from 8540w too?

THX.

[Thiefsie]

I find the screen good, however it has a fairly stong blue/purple cast that I have not calibrated out yet - need a decent colorimeter to do it.

On a side note I've had some major issues with my M4600 in the last week...

Firstly I cam back from 3 weeks overseas and plugged it in back at work (I didn't take it away with me) and heard a nice fizzing sound and then smelt acrid burning electronic stuff - obviously fried something in the mobo or DC in cable inside the laptop.

Got Dell to replace mobo and DC in cord ok after a bit of faffing about etc - warranty seemed fine - pity it was completely out of use for a day as the battery was dead and I had no computer to work on.

Anyway... it's now 5 days later and again on Monday coming back to work I notice it is sluggish as all hell when I turned it on and powered it up. We're not talking a little slow here, we're talking it takes about 5 seconds for the start menu to open when I click the start button... After pulling my hair out for ages trying to figure out what it was and uninstalling anti virus etc... I inadvertently unplugged the power cord and lo and behold the laptop is instantly super fast again - on battery power...

is that about? I Tried two different AC packs with it (180 and 210w) and both have the same result... frustratingly it is instantly different with plugging and unplugging the C packs into the back of the laptop.

After faffing on the phone to Dell for about 2 hours, trying to update things, various useless BIOS setting tweaks and defaults etc (including turning off C-States, checking that the BIOS can see the AC adapters and their wattages fine (is reported as charging - although the battery most definitely is not being charged...) I give up and just want another tech out to have a look at it tomorrow.

So I virtually give up for another day of work and then I move location in the office and the laptop seems to be better... so I'm suspect about the power socket in the wall at my desk now... However I do something for 10 minutes and then come back and the pc is slow as a sloth again... I proceed to try it in different plugs all around the office with no difference. Unplugged - works perfectly fine... plugged in - complete sh!t.

I'm now at home trying it here and it also is complete crap when plugged in, and perfect when on battery (which is well and truly on 0% and dies in about 10 seconds of being unplugged... making it more painful. Seriously booting into windows 7 takes about 6 minutes on an SSD while this 'throttling' is activated.

Otherwise there is nothing I can do, I have no other dell laptop to try the AC packs on in the meantime and I just have to wait for a tech to see what is up tomorrow hopefully.

Anyone have any clever ideas about this?

I've been suspect with the grounding on the power at work for a while now as I did briefly get external monitor flicker until I made the AC adapter plug in to a different socket from the monitor... could that be related?

I'll update when I have an update!

[Thiefsie]

Hmmm no news apart from that a new AC Adapter didn't do the trick (from Dell) so the tech replaced DCin cable, Mobo, cpu and ac adapter which did the trick and the pc works fine now.

[Retrospec]

amazing review, and yes you're right no one likes the 16:9 screen. ESPECIALLY for a high end mobile workstation. The idiots who make the panels really screwed us professionals, DELL should do all they can to keep the 16:10 format just like what Apple is doing. I will never get a 16:9 mobile workstation, I rather get refurbished 16:10 ones.

[murthyvs]

Hello - Anyone facing laptop display issues when external display is connected with VGA? For some reason, when I unplug the VGA cable, my laptop display goes blank and no matter what I do, it dont get back my desktop. I had to restart it! This is very weird. My graphics card is AMD Firepro. Thanks for your help!