MSI FX420-001US 14-Inch Laptop - Black

I've had this laptop for a week now and its nothing short of what is advertised. The Sandy Bridge i5 processor really takes the highlight for this laptop. When I first got it, it felt light. Like REAL Unbelievably Light for all these specs. I was looking for a sandy bridge i5 laptop with USB 3.0 and this just fits right in the budget.

What I did not expect was the screen size. I've owned three 14 inchers before this and the screen size on those was a lot larger if i recall correctly. Because it has a 1366x728 display, the screen is now wide instead of square, hence the screen is wide like a 15 inch , but has the height of a 13 inch laptop.

Apart from the LED screen there was one other let down. The 500GB hard drive was just 5400rpm and hence makes the whole system operate like a snail. i5 or i7, the hard drive speed kills the whole purpose of sandy bridge and 6GB Ram.

I immediately ordered a 128GB Steady State Drive Kingston SSDNow V Series 128 GB SATA 3 GB/s 2.5Inch Solid State Drive with Desktop Upgrade Kit Bundle SNV425-S2BD/128GB and installed it. Now nothing can slow this baby down. If you are considering going for this laptop, get a Steady State Drive to maximize performance, unless you don't really care about performance.

The Keyboard is quite a treat.

Finally, the 1GB Radeon graphics Card runs side by side with the Intel internal graphics. The Intel default upon startup but as applications need the graphics power, the 1GB takes over. I have never seed this actually happen though. I ran NFS Shift 2 after i set up the graphics options in the Catalyst Control Center but I saw no difference. Maybe I still have to tinker with the settings a bit more to get the card to work.

To Sum it up

Pros:

i5 Processor

6GB Ram

Chicklet Keyboard

Lightweight as nothing else

Great THX sound (surround)

HDMI out

USB 3.0

Multitouch Trackpad ( although the beaded feeling "boils my blood" sometimes )

Cons:

Slow Hard Drive

Smaller LED Screen than expected

Laptop gets hot under heavy load (playing 1080p movies over HDMI & Video Conversion. etc..)

They say it is an anti finger print design but its not anti grease ( oil and grease is easily transferred to the lid )

Loads of Bloatware Applications ( I uninstalled most of them as soon as i got it )

Hope this helps

Yudhistre

I've had this unit for a year with no real issues. My chief concern in purchasing was finding a desk-top replacement for gaming and movies that is also light enough for me to bike a few miles with. It has done its job well. Out of the box it can handle all but the largest of games, has no problem with movies, and is still lighter than any of my text books. It's a little obsolete now, especially the graphics card, but still handles well.

My only complaints are the underpowered speakers and short battery-life; you cannot hear what you are working on if there is any sort of background noise and have to plug in if you want to game or watch a movie for any longer than 45 minutes. The first problem is easily solved with a good set of earphones, but the second is quite annoying. Even if you are just running Word, the battery only lasts 2 or 3 hours.

Overall, best machine I've ever owned, and the defects are minor.

Buy MSI FX420-001US 14-Inch Laptop - Black Now

Its a great laptop especially for the price, comes with a lot of ram, big hard drive and battery life is pretty good. Also it doesn't have that much bloatware, there's no bluetooth however. The reason I got this laptop is because mine had just died and I needed something asap for school so I bought this bad boy.

Pros

good battery life

6 gb ram

500 gb hard drive (although its partitioned)

can play games with decent graphics, but the battery life goes down tremendously

keyboard is chiclet style

Cons

the mouse sucks

the facial recognition login doesnt work too well

All in all I think its a good buy for the price and the specs, you can't beat it.

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