Bought a new laptop. :) Rate?

KGhaleon

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?skuId=8780198&type=product&id=1204332501169

It won't arrive until next week. Honestly, I've never liked the Gateway name-brand. I've had nothing but bad experiences with Gateway in the past when repairing them for customers. I went with this one because I've heard the video card is *excellent* and the specs aren't bad for the price. I don't generally hear bad things about Gateway laptops, so I'll take the risk. I'm drooling in anticipation of powering this thing up.

I may keep Vista, but I'll repartition it and create a dual-boot with my XP license. I'll transfer all the junk off my old, dying Toshiba laptop.

My current laptop I've had since 2001, so anything is better right now.
(it plays Arcanum at least)

KG

Talic

wasn't it the 8000 series that was part of the defected chips that vendors were asking to recall? I didn't read into it much since I don't buy nvidia cards but I think a lot of hush hush was going on when it came to the exact model cards.

KGhaleon

Can't say I've heard that, though I can't find anything on it. Reviews sound good and it apparently holds up well.

hypnotoad

I'll summarize the current state of gateway:

- 20% failure rate within 1 month on our desktops. Motherboards, power supplies, fans, switches, you name it.

- Can't get a hold of our sales rep because he now works for MPC and they dont forward his phone or email. He won't return our calls because he's "too busy cancelling orders" (in his own words).

- Systems take 3 months to ship out because they moved all the factories to mexico and now are trying to bring them back.

- Parts take 2 weeks to ship.

- Gateway now employs 100 people in south dakota, where they originated, down from 6500 people. they have left a ghosttown. anyone need any vacant buildings? how about A+ certified crystal meth freaks for hire?

- They have a warehouse full of cisco 6500 and AS/400's sitting there doing nothing (i am trying to get some of that for myself). They threw away all their money.

Gateway is nearly totally defunct. Their stock was bought by acer for $2 a share. The gateway name is supposed to fade out within a few months. MPC (who bought gateways business-class division) doesn't even brand their systems as Gateway anymore. Their web site has been down, and since they are now Acer and MPC you can't find drivers or support nearly as easy as any other vendor.

Nothing against your laptop. I just hate gateway. [/i]

undomiel

MPC will send you in phone loops as well when you call in. I went through 3 different phone numbers only to end up at the same number I originally called to begin with. Haven't had too much trouble with the hardware, just replacing CD/DVD drives on the desktops and laptops and had one failed memory stick. There's another machine I suspect of memory/motherboard problems but I haven't gotten around to troubleshooting it as there is no real need for it right now.

KGhaleon

Pic:
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/mobile/2008/gateway-p6831fx/gateway-p6831fx-open.jpg

Got it yesterday and have enjoyed it so far. It's a monster. I went and purchased a copy of Oblivion GoTY and set everything to High and it ran beautifully. Only problem I've had so far was getting it to Dualboot between Vista/XP. Vista is fine, but XP doesn't want to work with vista.

I will be buying a USB mouse today and setting this laptop up on a table(cardboard box, cough) somewhere. I don't really need to bring it with me anywhere and have no trips scheduled.

I'm going to start moving all my data over to the new laptop soon. The 320GB hard drive is very nice to have. Anyone know how big a partition Vista needs? I noticed that I can't shrink it below 55GB or something. Being able to expand/extend without rebooting is cool.

dynamik

KGhaleon wrote:

Got it yesterday and have enjoyed it so far. It's a monster. I went and purchased a copy of Oblivion GoTY and set everything to High and it ran beautifully. Only problem I've had so far was getting it to Dualboot between Vista/XP. Vista is fine, but XP doesn't want to work with vista.

Shouldn't be a problem. What's giving you a hard time? Did you install XP first or second? You should have done it first. If you did it second, boot off the Vista media and have it fix the boot configuration.

KGhaleon wrote:

I'm going to start moving all my data over to the new laptop soon. The 320GB hard drive is very nice to have. Anyone know how big a partition Vista needs? I noticed that I can't shrink it below 55GB or something. Being able to expand/extend without rebooting is cool.

Good luck shrinking it: http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/windows-vista/working-around-windows-vistas-shrink-volume-inadequacy-problems/

You should just go with Acronis' Disk Director Suite or Partition Magic (which seems to suck now that Symantec got it).

I wouldn't put it at 20gb or lower. I did that with a couple, and I started running out of space just from updates, etc. They were just for streaming media from other machines, so I didn't think They'd need that much, but they did.

KGhaleon

It had Vista already and I didn't want to bother reinstalling it, so I installed my copy of XP. It booted into XP fine, but would not recognize Vista. So I booted into the Vista CD and repaired the bootloader(startup repair). It then would give me the selection for Vista and XP, with Vista working fine. Trying to boot into XP would give me an error.
This is because it's looking in the wrong location for the boot files(looking in the same place where Vista would look).

Btw, for XP and Vista I definitely recommend going into the performance options and adjusting for best performance. With SP1 installed, Vista feels a bit more like XP.

dynamik

You can easily edit your Vista boot configuration with this: http://www.vistabootpro.org/

It shouldn't be a big deal to fix the XP option.

jryantech

That thing looks really hooked up.

I like it, ship it to me now

astorrs

jryantech wrote:

That thing looks really hooked up.

I like it, ship it to me now

My back hurts just looking at it... I'm sure its perfect for you though. Congrats!

remyforbes777

To me it's kind of pricey and weighs wayyyy too much.

Aldur

remyforbes777 wrote:

To me it's kind of pricey and weighs wayyyy too much.

The price doesn't bother me to much but the weight does.

I bought a laptop a few years back, 2004 I think, with the idea of using it for school and playing world of warcraft. Well the damn thing was so heavy, 11 lbs without the charger, about 13 lbs with the charger, that it was such a pain to carry any where. To top it off, when the battery was brand new it lasted at max 1 hr, and that was just if the latop was sitting there doing nothing, if i ran a game or anything 15 mins tops and I'd be looking for a AC outlet. And since the battery sucked so bad when I took it places I just plugged it in, which was one of the things that I wanted to avoid.

To me, if your going to buy a laptop, then buy a laptop that *is* portable and if you need a powerful comp to play games buy/build a desktop. High performance parts are always so much more expensive for a laptop anyhow.

dynamik

It took me a second to figure out why it weighs so much because I have an almost identical machine that's 2/3 the weight. His is a 17" though. I almost went that route, but I'm glad I didn't. I have a 24" that I plug into at home and at work, and 15.4" is more than adequate when out and about.

Aldur, you have to remember that it's also more expensive to buy a desktop in addition to a laptop. If you need a laptop, it does make sense to put a little extra money into more expensive components

I get a few hours of battery life under a decent load. I'm sure I could stretch that out quite a bit if I got picky about things.

Aldur

dynamik wrote:

Aldur, you have to remember that it's also more expensive to buy a desktop in addition to a laptop. If you need a laptop, it does make sense to put a little extra money into more expensive components

ahhh very true, if you get both you are looking at a decent amount of cash. With my experience with a large laptop I just ended up leaving it home because it was so heavy and in the end had wished that I had just bought/built a nice desktop.

Currently I am pretty much doing the same as you dynamik, I have a 12" widescreen laptop that I plug into a 24" screen at home. I just can't work at home on a 12" screen!

dynamik

My last notebook was a 12", and that was just too small. I have larger hands, and the keyboard was slightly smaller than full size. It was a pain to work with. I've been really happy with my 15.4". It seems to be the perfect combination of size and portability.

I'm still holding on to the 12" one though. I figure it'll make a fun little pentesting or whatever device.

KGhaleon

http://dreamincode.net/forums/showtopic26756.htm

I got the dualboot working with these instructions. Looks great now.
(though I have to install all of XPs drivers later)

HeroPsycho

Why dual boot? Virtualize XP when you need to run stuff in XP that won't run in Vista, which is increasingly less and less.

dynamik

Oh sorry, I thought you did that when you mention you fixed it earlier. I just skimmed it and didn't see you just did the auto-repair.

edit: HP, I think he wants it for gaming performance.

On that note, I have no problem gaming in Vista. XP would just be a waste of space at this point. You should really determine if the extra 2-3 frames per second are really worth the hassle. The only complaint I've gotten from a few of my friends is trying to play old games that require IPX. There are a few hacks to get IPX going on Vista, but they seem to be hit-and-miss.

Aldur

dynamik wrote:

My last notebook was a 12", and that was just too small. I have larger hands, and the keyboard was slightly smaller than full size. It was a pain to work with. I've been really happy with my 15.4". It seems to be the perfect combination of size and portability.

I'm still holding on to the 12" one though. I figure it'll make a fun little pentesting or whatever device.

Ya, i've noticed that about my 12" laptop too, the keyboard is a little small, but since its widescreen its not too small, still usable. Without a doubt the next laptop i get is going to be 15", not to big not to small and I won't have to squint to see the damn screen!

KGhaleon

Yes, XP for performance. Vista doesn't seem as fast as XP, even on my older laptop which only has a celeron CPU and 256MB RAM.

I turned off a lot of Vistas features and disabled services or apps that weren't needed. With SP1 and very little running, it looks and feels much like XP...but it just doesn't have the speed I'd expect. That disappoints me. It's been defragged as well.

I'm also disappointed that while I have a dualboot working now, I can't really use XP because there appears to be no driver support for it on this laptop. I have only gotten the wireless drivers working.

If I wanted XP for compatibility or testing, I would have just used VMware. meh

dynamik

KGhaleon wrote:

Yes, XP for performance. Vista doesn't seem as fast as XP, even on my older laptop which only has a celeron CPU and 256MB RAM.

That's like saying XP doesn't run well on 64mb.

KGhaleon wrote:

I turned off a lot of Vistas features and disabled services or apps that weren't needed. With SP1 and very little running, it looks and feels much like XP...but it just doesn't have the speed I'd expect. That disappoints me. It's been defragged as well.

Did it come preloaded with a bunch of crap? I assume it did. You should just do a clean install. That's the first thing I do with those types of machines. There's no reason you shouldn't be getting great performance with that. There's no perceivable difference between the two on my machine.

KGhaleon wrote:

I'm also disappointed that while I have a dualboot working now, I can't really use XP because there appears to be no driver support for it on this laptop. I have only gotten the wireless drivers working.

That's funny. You can probably hunt them all down individually from each manufacturer. Sounds like it's time for a scavenger hunt! Once you have them, you should use nLite to embed them in XP installation media, so you don't have to do this all again if you need to reinstall.

KGhaleon

Let me clarify, I meant that XP runs faster on my older computer than Vista does on my new powerhouse laptop.

and a lot of those drivers you linked to seem to be for Vista.

Though I may just stick with Vista. I'm getting used to it and I can't say that it's all that bad after cleaning the crap off. I don't know how well the security and compatibility is compared to XP with SP1 installed.

dynamik

KGhaleon wrote:

Let me clarify, I meant that XP runs faster on my older computer than Vista does on my new powerhouse laptop.

Something isn't right. What were the specs of your old system?

KGhaleon wrote:

and a lot of those drivers you linked to seem to be for Vista.

Yea I know. I meant that it's funny that places are starting to drop support for XP.

KGhaleon wrote:

Though I may just stick with Vista. I'm getting used to it and I can't say that it's all that bad after cleaning the crap off. I don't know how well the security and compatibility is compared to XP with SP1 installed.

Usually a clean install works better than simply uninstalling that crap. Your system never seems to return to it's pristine state.

hypnotoad

I have seen about 50 different brand-new laptops in the past 2 weeks and they all seem to run like **** compared to older XP systems without all the vendor-provided crapware/Vista.