So very recently my beloved 2013 era XPS 13 developer edition finally failed. The HID controller failed and that’s pretty much it for these things. As a result of this I ended up switching back to my spare laptop (well technically mobile workstation) which is an M3800 with Intel and Nvidia (K1100) based system. Aside from the fact that the touch pad and keyboard on this thing are garbage (and I mean that in the kindest possible way) the system itself works well.

As a means of getting up and running quickly I just yanked the drive out of the XPS 13 and installed it in the M3800…

A few things to note — The nouveu module needs to be blacklisted, not just for this machine but for every machine with an nvidia chip in it. It’s horrible and buggy and doesn’t work right in most cases.

That said don’t bother with the nvidia drivers for the K1100. It’s not worth the brain damage trying to figure out why X won’t run right, and worse, it’s not worth the brain damage to try and figure out why every video intensive task now page tears like crazy.

Also it seems that the ALS nor the keyboard back light control works correctly. As I play around with this system more I will post updates and suggestions to fixing things for those of you who are running this system.

Having bitched enough, I should mention that I have a new 16GB I7 XPS 13 Developer Edition on the way. That should be a lot of fun =)