Joined on 08/31/07
Excellent Price for a Gaming Laptop
Pros: Laptop replacement for my wife. i7 throttles from .93 ghz to 1.73 Ghz. Nvidia 240 is sweet. Plays Crysis on high at native resolution which is less than average resolution. My wife does not game. Had a video on Hulu, a DVD from my collection, several monitoring apps, iTunes and other things open and was using about 30% of the CPU. Sweet!
Cons: Massive Bloatware. I wiped the hardrive and started with a fresh OEM Win7 pro. Crysis increased temps to 85c GPU and 74c CPU so I would not recommend marathon Crysis sessions. Function key is the left most bottom key. Weird but not worth an egg.
Overall Review: I should have waited a month to buy this for the extra $100 off. No biggie though. Use the extra $100 to buy a Win7 pro OEM disk and you will be happy. Old lappy is going to My 9 year old with a fresh Ubuntu install. Seriously, check out other laptops with i7, GT240m and 4 gig ram. They can be as much as $1,200 to $1,400.
Update
Pros: It has pretty lights. Update to Brave Sir Robin previous review
Cons: Red LED on the front panel started blinking. The user guide says this is critical so I checked to see if all of my data was still there; all okay. So I decided to update the firmware. Went smooth until I went to rebuild the RAID 5 Arrray. Failed to build 6 or 7 times. Contacted Western Digital via email and they told me , get this, "they do not support RAID 5"
Overall Review: Hey, Western Digital, have people who actually work for your company answer the email.
3 screen gaming
Pros: I wrote a review earlier on a 2nd NEC and this is my 3rd 24" NEC monitor and again no dead pixel. Great cheap gaming panel. I will reiterate that this is NOT a monitor to do color sensitive work such as professional photography or video editing. This monitor is good for everything else. You can't buy a professional caliber IPS monitor for $300 bucks and NEC does makes the P series for that. I have 2 LED backlit and one fluorescent. I'm going to have to buy a 3rd led since the colors are so m c nicer.
Cons: They aren't free
Overall Review: Gaming with NVidia surround on 3 NEC 24" monitor is immersive and intense
No DEAD PIXELS
Pros: Good price for a GOOD 24" 1920 x 1200 TN panel. This is NOT a Professional IPS true color monitor. I use this for gaming 90% of the time and we watch DVD and Blu Rays 5% and I do normal stuff the other 5%. DVD/BR video is excellent with a monitor menu tweak. I need 1920 x 1200 for gaming because my first NEC is 1920 x 1200 and the only other panel that I considered was the $am$ung which make great panels but I've had a few dead pixels with the 2 $am$ungs that I've owned and with the 2 NEC 24" monitors that I've had I have had NO DEAD PIXELS. SOLD! This is the 2nd monitor of a 3 monitor Nvidia Surround View setup. I'm buying a 3rd NEC 24" 1920 x 1200 as soon as my credit card drops a littlle. THREE SCREEN GAMING...w00T!
Cons: The color on this monitor will NOT match an older flourescent back lit monitor very well. I wish all monitors were $1.00...with free shipping.
Overall Review: Q6600 @ 3.0, 8 Gig OCZ SLi RAM, 1,000 watt OCZ Gold Series PSU, 2-GTX 580 (in and out of SLi), Win 7, Win 8 Cust Preview, Ubuntu 12.04 triple boot, 2,260,000 pts. folding@home.
GTX580 on an 'old' system
Pros: I got it a day earlier than expected. Plugged it into the slot where one of my old 88900GTS G92s went and kept the other 8800 for PhysX. Fraps showed 28 to 45 FPS in Crysis at 8x and Crysis Wahead at 16x in some of the GPU sucking scenes like inside the frozen sphere. The Just Cause 2 benchmark was maxed out completely at 32x and I got 43 FPS. I used 1900 X 1200 native resolution for the gaming benchmarks. No louder than the 8800 but a different pitch. Temps are 38 to 42 idle and 48 to 53 blasting the heck out of stuff with fan set at 75%. 3DMARKVantage went from 13,468 to 22,860 with PhysX on (which is a no-no is benchmark world). I used EVGA Precision to OC it in 2 steps to 800/1600/2000 so there is no reason to buy the Super clocked version in my humble opinion. Absolutely amazing improvement on an old system. Remember this is a DX10 board and PCIe 1.0.
Cons: None. I haven't upgraded the board and CPU to Sandybridge.
Overall Review: Thermaltake 850 W PSU, Q6600 OC'd 3.0 GHz, EVGA 680i board, 8Gig DDR2 at 956 MHz, 300 G Velociraptor, Antec 900 with 4 120mm fans and the 200 mm on top. 2-20 inch and 1-24 inch monitor, Dual boot Win7 64 and Ubuntu. I Love Newegg! The coupon for the 2 games is through steam which is great.
Very Good netty
Pros: This is a very nice netty for $200. Nice screen. Win7 starter is nice for a single core, hyperthreaded low wattage CPU. Task manager shows 2 virtual cores (sweet!). I dual boot with Ubuntu 10.10 which uses way less resources. I bought it for a trip to Hawai'i and was excellent for movies and music on the plane and basic PC uses. I loaded Open Office and that works perfectly. A little bloatware was preinstalled and I removed about 3 out of 5 programs. Excellent battery life of about 6 to 8 hours. Keyboard is 92% full.
Cons: Audio from the earphone jack was VERY low with all settings maxed. I downloaded the latest RealTek audio driver and it's way better. Integrated mics are so-so. Speakers are weak. I gave it 4 eggs because this is my first netty and an inexpensive one at that.
Overall Review: Someone mentioned trying to put a 64bit OS on this netbook....Why? It's a 32 bit CPU. Low wattage, high battery life, no video or audio card means long battery life for a basic PC in a very small package. DO NOT upgrade to Win 7 regular versions. It will slow this little netty down to a crawl. If you want more performance go to Ubuntu which uses about 1/3 of the RAM and CPU of Win 7.