iBUYPOWER Gamer Valkyrie CZ-17 NE775i Notebook Intel Core i7 3630QM(2.40GHz) 17.3" 16GB Memory DDR3 1333 120GB SSD 1TB HDD 5400rpm DVD±R/RW NVIDIA GeForce GTX 675MX

Pros: The system looks great and is real fast. The time it took to get to my location and the speed at which I opened the box and booted it was great! Thanks to newegg.

Cons: When I booted the laptop the keyboard would not work out of the box nor did the touch pad. After trying for a couple minutes I decided to hook up an external keyboard and mouse thinking maybe it was just Window 8 issue. They worked!! I got Windows 8 setup and decided to reboot since the reboot time is very very short on this machine, I first removed the keyboard and external mouse and rebooted as the install instructed me to do. After reboot it still did not see the keyboard or mouse! So, I hooked up the external ones and begin to investigate the situation more closely. After looking in device manager and seeing the keyboard but no touch pad I decided to click on the little switch in device manager called "Show hidden" which displays hidden device that are not hooked up at that time to see if it was something along that line. Nothing, no touch pad was even displayed! The keyboard I finally got to work after I put the laptop in hibernation mode and then back out! This seems more like a driver issue right! So I took out the CD and installed the drivers from the CD provided by IBP. Rebooted! Still not working! So I downloaded from IBP web site to get the latest thinking maybe just maybe this was the issue! Installed the new drivers and got Code 10! So, I went to the manufactures web site and downloaded the most recent drivers form Touch pad and keyboard and installed this time no Code 10!! Which is great right? So then I rebooted, still no response from the system. So I called IBP help desk and they instruct me it was a Windows 8 issue that I needed to re-install windows 8 or refresh which I did both I refreshed Windows 8 (puts additional back of old Windows 8) on your SSD drive not good! So after that did not fix the touch pad and keyboard issue I decided to totally re-install Windows 8 and then rebooted and then re-install the driver from the manufactures web site that I had put on the slave (2nd HDD) and then reboot! After the reboot I was back at square one! No keyboard and no touch pad still. Funny thing is I even tried enabling it after I got the keyboard running with the above mentioned hack by putting the laptop in hibernation mode then back out and upon hitting the Fn+F3 key I could see on the screen of the laptop the enable/disable of the touch pad.

Other Thoughts: I sent the laptop back to newegg and decided not to give up on IBP just so fast, there are always bad eggs in the bunch! We will see how it all turns out.

Manufacturer Response:

Dear valued iBUYPOWER customer,

Please kindly E-mail me your contact information and I will contact you directly regarding the issues you are experiencing. Can you also please register your product on http://www.ibuypower.com/retail.aspx to speed up the process if a RMA is needed. If you have any additional questions please email us at newegg@ibuypower.com. We will be more than gladly to help you out. Thanks again for choosing iBUYPOWER!