Samsung Series 3 NP300E5C-A02US 15.6-Inch Laptop (Blue Silver)

I give the Series 3 four stars, minus 1 for the crappy touchpad sensitivity. See Con comment below.

Pros:

Xlnt display resolution

Aesthetically appealing to the eye; cover is brushed 'ribbed' aluminum with 2" black band at rear.

Wide keys, short pressure, positive feel

Full numbers keypad on right

Single screw holds cover to memory and HDD, makes for easy swap out

No dumb WiFi on/off switch front panel, prevents accidentally switching off connection

A full pound lighter than Dell

Strong solid looking hinges

i5-3210M Ivy Bridge, HD4000 controller works as designed

3MB L3 cache

CON: The super sensitive touchpad.

**First thing first; Use the touchpad to set screen size, then go to ctrl panel, Synaptics Touchpad to disable BOTH one-finger and multi-finger gestures. If you don;t this is what you can expect:

1. Sensitivity -horizontal AND vertical scrolling is at the next to last slowest speed.

2. If the left palm is within 1/8-1/4" proximity of the touchpad, the touchpad shrinks or enlarges your screen on its own. Tapping an resetting screen size constantly is annoying. Mostly dues to far left placement of the pad, not centered.

3. Email composes start @ 14+ font then shrinks to 10 and back and forth and back and forth all over the place. When composing the font size appears normal. When the display size changes the fonts do to but they never reset to the last display. Major bug.

More CONS:

1. Annoying bloatware

2. Power cord on left, I prefer right

3. No keyboard backlite

4. OK Samsung memory, 1x4GB & 1x2GB, latency 11-11-11-28. This was swapped for new 2x4Gb sticks

5. Big hunky/clunky 750GB SATA HDD. This was swapped for an SSD. Boot time is now 9 seconds. HDD being used as an external drive

6. Weak/low L1 & L2 cache [256kb]

7. Samsung online Chat Support is h-o-r-r-i-b-l-e. They're absolutely brainless and will waste your time. With a rating of 1 to 10, I generously give them a -10 [minus ten]. Do your own troubleshooting.

8. Battery life claim is up to 6.3 hrs. Even at the lowest setting the best I can get is 4.5 hrs, as indicted in the notification bar.

Don't forget to check the update page. The i5-3210M is fast for a tier 2 CPU, better than other i5's as it does turbo from 2.6 to 3.1GHZ.

The Atheros wireless card that came installed in this laptop was defective and wouldn't hold a connection no matter what network it was connected to. I contacted Samsung and they confirmed that it seemed to be a hardware issue. I returned it and got a replacement laptop. Same issue. I did some research and these cards are just bad. It's a shame because otherwise, the computer is great, but trying to deal with the all the internet issues and hardware problems were beyond frustrating. Terrible experience.

Buy Samsung Series 3 NP300E5C-A02US 15.6-Inch Laptop (Blue Silver) Now

This laptop is awesome!!! I am a full time student and use it primarily for school, not gaming. It does have an integrated HD graphics card which gives an excellent graphic performance for watching videos or just browsing the web. The i5 processor accompanied with 6GB of RAM makes this laptop super-fast. Out of the box the Windows Experience Index rates this laptop at a 5.7. You can check you WEI by going into the Computer>System Properties> Windows Experience Index. It rates a 5.7 because of the Graphics card, the processor and RAM rate at 7.1 and 7.4 respectfully and the hard drive rates at 5.9. This computer has room for improvements if you want make some upgrades, upgrading the RAM to 8GB and swapping out the hard drive for a solid state will make this thing ridiculous and raise the index on it considerably, especially if you are using for the same thing that I am which is mostly school work and emails.

I have always hated using touchpads on laptops until I started using the touchpad on this one. The pad is large and the so are the buttons, the pad also lets you do multi finger gestures. You can pinch to zoom, two fingers lets you scroll up and down, and three fingers lets you navigate forward and backward. You also have the ability to turn off the touchpad altogether by holding down the Fn key and hitting F5. There are many other features to this laptop that it makes it great like the sleep function when you close the laptop. The laptop is sturdy and is of good design, esthetically it looks great and the sound from the speakers is loud and clear. The boot time is under a minute, I have never timed it but it is significantly faster than my old computer. It also runs cool so no need for a cool pad.

Aside from all the positive things that I have to say about the laptop there is a few negative. I have experienced some malfunction when browsing with Facebook. Sometimes when I try to navigate to Facebook the browser throws up an error and I cannot logon. This could be a problem with Facebook or the browser that I am using, either way the problem is only intermittent and is not too much of an inconvenience. I have also on occasion heard when opening a file or a link that plays audio the speakers will make small pop before playing. These are all problems that I have yet to address but I think are very fixable. All in all this is an excellent laptop for the price and is very versatile and sturdy enough to last for several years. I give it 4.5 out of 5!

Manual:Recommended RAM upgrade:

Crucial CT2CP51264BC1067 8GB 204-PIN PC3-8500 SODIMM DDR3 (4GBx2)

Or:

Samsung Electronics Extreme Low Voltage 30nm SODIMM 8 Dual Channel Kit DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) 204-Pin DDR3 SO-DIMM MV-3T4G3D/US

Recommended hard drive upgrade:

SAMSUNG 830 Series 2.5-Inch 64GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-7PC064B/WW

Read Best Reviews of Samsung Series 3 NP300E5C-A02US 15.6-Inch Laptop (Blue Silver) Here

I bought this item recently and am wondering why , when i open up experience index, my cpu is reading at 2.5 ghz

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-3210M CPU @ 2.50GHz 7.1

Memory (RAM) 6.00 GB 7.5

Graphics Intel(R) HD Graphics 4000 5.1

Gaming graphics 1696 MB Total available graphics memory 6.5

Primary hard disk 618GB Free (675GB Total) 5.9

Determined by lowest subscore 5.1

somebody help! :)

Want Samsung Series 3 NP300E5C-A02US 15.6-Inch Laptop (Blue Silver) Discount?

Purchased this Samsung Laptop (NEW) as a Christmas gift from "City Electronic" thru Amazon.com. AVOID BUYING FROM THE THIS SELLER.... Here is why. When this laptop arrived, it started to BLUESCREEN from the beginning..having some knowledge of Windows machines..I ran a hardware check and found that the Ram or memory was defective. I immediately contacted the seller and ask for a refund or exchange...the seller told me to contact Samsung and refuse to take it back...called Amazon and filed a complaint...because third party sellers must have a 30 day return or exchange policy ...but that did not matter, because the seller was still allowed to sell the same new Laptop thru Amazon.com...Called Samsung and was told mail it to them at my expense and it wound take 3-4 weeks for it to be repaired...later I purchased ram for $42.18 and asked the seller to pay for that ( he did) later after seeing the claim...I swapped out the ram and the laptop worked perfectly (note) the door to the ram and hard drive...is made of very cheap plastic, has to be bent into place for it to fit...I did buy a 3 year SquareTrade warranty for this laptop...did not think that that I should be having to use it 7 days after a new purchased that comes with factory warranty... the seller and Amazon.com let me down....Samsung just has slow and bad customer service...LIKE MOST BIG COMPANIES...bigger is not better. look closely at the seller's return policy before buying from them....good customer service is not important most companies...their bottom line seems to be more profit.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_201077750_RRlandingCantReturn?nodeId=201077750

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