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About LinkBacksRead more.15.6in multimedia entertainment laptop reviewed and rated.
Read more.15.6in multimedia entertainment laptop reviewed and rated.
This range is confusing. I got the i7 with 1600x900 for £750 from Comet, with a 640Gb disk. Now the only one you can buy is the 750GB model, with a 1366x768, at £999. £250 for 110Gb? Although the website said mine had the lower res screen, it actually has the higher res one, so I will ignore that stat...
I bought mine from Currys. Got the i7, 1600x900 and 640Gb HDD for £750 like you. What a steal. Sometimes Currys just don't know what they have. I don't believe there is another laptop out at this time that can touch it for performance / cost. I cloned the original HDD to a Seagate Momentus XT 750 (which has a 8GB SSD cache) and dumped the bloatware and my boot times are less than 20 secs. If this laptop had twin HDD bays it would be close to perfect.
My only gripes are....not to keen on the keyboard. Looks cheap, hard to read and being silver with black behind it really shows the keys not being perfectly straight and level. I am no touch typist and find it hard to speed type on. The USB ports are to close together so two fat sticks won't fit on the same side. Boy does it kick out some heat when stressed. I use a Belkin N52 gamepad when gaming. Always have to save my laptops keyboard and the inevitable cramp you get playing on them. The machine kick out lots of hot air on the left side and you have to keep your hand well away or the hairs on your hands will shrivel. It's pretty heavy. I am often travelling and lugging it around is a pain in the shoulders. However I've done the small and light and they just don't cut it for doing gaming and serious work on.
I really like the performance. I chucked in a matched 4gb sodim to replace the 2gb to give me the max 8gb total as I often run virtual machines. The HDD change also made an already fast machine even more responsive. The sound is fantastic. Better than any laptop I have ever heard. It's very quiet when your not poking it with a demanding game like Deus Ex:HR.
The reviewer complains about battery life. Not sure how they're testing it but I can get over 4 hrs when I flick it to Asus Power4gears Battery Life profile. I don't think that's to bad. I didn't buy the machine to watch movies on the go anyway. I bought it for the performance and have not been disappointed.
A good deal, no doubt, but I'll still take mine:for £783.05. Now upgraded with 750GB HDD and 256GB SSDOriginally Posted by Technically refurbished but in reality new, from Dell Outlet Store
That 555GT is pumping out some good performance - significantly more than nvidia's own 525. I'm surprised the battery life isn't much better though (thks for your bench major trouble) - so is it using Optimus or not?
1600x900 definitely more desirable than 1366... silver keyboard looks pretty ridiculous to me though...
If you did a fresh install of windows 7 without bloatware, would you at least be able to selectively install asus's power4gears?
They're using Optimus and it's easily configurable in the Nvidia control panel. I believe Optimus is part of Nvidia driver package so even with a clean install of Windows it will be enabled with the driver install. At least Asus are signed up with Verde and you can download and use the latest driver posted by Nvidia and not have to wait for the manufaturers (cough, Sony, cough) interpretation like my last machine. It was a pain hacking the drivers to work all because of a product code.
1600 x 900 is good enough for movies and perfect for the GT555 to run most stuff at native res. It's even good for work. The best compromise I think.
You can do a fresh install of Windows quiet easily to rid it of the bloatware but I didn't bother. I wanted to keep the recovery partition functional just in case I had a serious problem when away from home. All the Asus software is in a directory called eSupport on the C drive so saving and installing the bits that you need / want after a fresh install is no biggie. It's freely available on Asus site to. Using the factory install, cleaning out the dross and then running CCleaner, Auslogic Registry Cleaner and TuneUp Utilities 2012 on a regular basis keeps it clean enough for me. Running those I've never had to do a re-install because my computer is running slow.
Noli (20-02-2012)
Out of interest, does anyone have any idea how much bloatware decreases the cost of an installation? Presumably the reason it's there is to provide advertising revenue to the OEM who can then sell the hardware at a cheaper price?
Without turning this into an Apple debate, I'm just curious as to how much companies feel willing to add on top for providing the computer in a 'clean' state when you buy it? We all know Apple laptops are overpriced (let's for the moment ignore the fact they're often underspecced with regards to RAM, BluRay etc.), but they don't come filled with bloatware and one would assume they charge an extra premium for that.
Microsoft offer a similar scheme called Signature for $99, in comparison. In real world examples (e.g. Amazon) it looks to cost around $80 for Joe Public to get the crapware gotten rid of automatically.
Also I seem to remember Dell charging extra for a Linux installation - presumably because they couldn't install any of their crap on it.
Still cheaper to go into a PC repair shop and get them to do it.
Last edited by Whiternoise; 19-02-2012 at 10:01 AM.
Interesting point of discussion but let me ask you this....
What would you buy....
1). Cheaper machine with bloatware included which is easily removed.
2). More expensive machine (say $50) with no bloatware.
I know the bloatware is a pain but sometimes it's good. I use Power4gear, Wireless Console (no hard key), Live Update and Smartlogon and like the fancy popups but that's me. If you don't just uninstall, no big deal really.
If you want to do a clean install you better have another OS disc as none are included and the restore will just put the bloat on as well. With a clean install you'll learn more about what your machine needs to run as a minimum. Why would you take it to a repair shop to remove the bloat? Where's the fun in that?
Hi there, I've just purchased one of these laptops and you say it's easy enough to do a clean install. Can you please help me with some instructions on how I do the clean install. I don't hvae the OEM disc, just the product key. Thanks very much
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