M6400 – Darwin Mach

By Darwin Mach on Computer Hardware tagged comparison, cpu, dell, disassembly, efi, guide, hardware, intel, M6400, m6600, manual, mxm, nvidia, optimus, precision, RAM, replacement, service, teardownwith 30 Comments

Dell Precision M6600 vs M6400 Hardware (Overview & Disassembly)

So here’s my long overdue hardware review / disassembly “guide” of the Dell Precision M6600… (Thanks, Dell for the exchange upgrade covered under your wonderful warranty!)

DISCLAIMER: I take no responsibility for what you do with your own machine. Also, any “guidance” herein is merely suggestions and is in no way an official disassembly instructions from Dell. When writing this, I assume that you have working knowledge on laptop repair. You’ve been warned.

My apologies if some of these pictures are blurry – I was in a hurry to get my new M6600 up and running so I wasn’t as careful as I could have been to get better quality pictures.

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By Darwin Mach on Tech Tips, Tutorials tagged BIOS, dell, M6400, memory, memtest86+, on, POST, power, precision, RAM, self, testwith 2 Comments

Fix that slow BIOS Power-On-Self-Test! (Dell Laptops)

I installed 16GB of ram into my Precision M6400 the other day and it things ran perfectly fine, until I had to force an ACPI shutdown by holding the power button.

When I turned it back on, the progress bar on the BIOS’s POST (power on self test) screen (big dell logo) got stuck at about 80% and started crawling for about 15 minutes before it moved on with the boot process. In my case, it was to ask for a biometric verification. But since it took so long to start up, I went to go do something else. By the time I got back, the laptop had turned itself off again because no credentials were provided to continue the boot process. So I turned it on again and had to wait out the full 15 minutes.

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By Darwin Mach on Tech Tips tagged dell, drivers, laptop, M6400, precisionwith 2 Comments

Dell Precision M6400 Audio & Touchpad Drivers

Hello all!

Just an update / followup to my previous post about the M6400 – you should be able to use the M6500’s audio and touchpad drivers (they’re newer, for the same hardware).

By Darwin Mach on Tech Tips tagged card, dell, IDT, M6400, precision, soundwith 2 Comments

Laptop Audio

So, my laptop is a Dell Precision M6400. For a while now, I’ve been experiencing some weird issues with the sound card (IDT HD Audio)

Some examples:
– Random audio hiccups
– Every time I open Adobe Soundbooth, open a file in soundbooth, or change my microphone settings, I get a brief, but loud piano slamming noise. Also any music or sounds I was playing in the background kept switching between stereo and mono output