This is truly an excellent bargain for the price. An i7 processor, 1TB hard-drive, and 17" HD screen? Whats not to love? Well, a few things but first:....The good.
As stated, an I7 processor which is very impressive especially at this price. If you bounce on over to you can see how this processor stacks up to others.
huge 1TB hard-drive to hold your entire movie/game/music collection
8GB ram which i believe (unconfirmed yet) is expandable to 16gb
4USB ports(not 2) 2 are 3.0, located on the left which are not shown in product pics or in description.
Full keyboard with numeric pad. A big plus as some laptops even giant ones like this refuse to include a numeric pad.
Great heat distribution, powerful processor fan. However i always recommend investing in a good laptop chill pad to help protect your investment and prolong life.
Good battery life(2-4hrs) for such a powerful PC. This is not a traveling laptop, it doesn't have an ultra 8-12hr battery life, don't expect to go all day long not plugged in. This is a powerhouse and needs to be plugged in.(also recommend turning on the feature where the battery doesn't charge beyond 80% to prolong life. its in there somewhere)
The bad:
CD rom drive. It works, well even but the button is so easy to hit it almost always pops out when moving it around. I know most laptops suffer from the cd rom button occasionally getting bumped and knocked out but on this one its ridiculous. Maybe if there was a recessed wall around it or something. its a complete pain.
Sound. This is a big one for me. Your speakers are slightly above worthless on this. They are tiny. tiny tiny. maybe 1inX0.5in on each side. that is it. its like having tweeters for your main sound. The speakers were the reason i removed a star. Do not expect any rich high-def sound with this laptop and there is plenty of wasted space they could have put bigger or more speakers. Headphones are better for sound quality but its not super rich sound due to sub-par sound card but with headphones the sound is much better, good enough for gaming
Graphics card. Your processor will outperform the graphics card. The card is of lower quality as well, so while your machine will handle all the superb graphics cranked to ultra high, your card will not display much change between the ulta high and around medium. So while your monitor is highdef, its not going to look super ultra pretty like you would see on today's common high-def TV. Its not a bad graphics card, just...average for budget laptop. This is a graphics card i would expect to find in a 300-500 laptop
Webcam. If this was the 2000-2010's it would be great but in today's technology my android has a better camera in it. Its good enough for say skype and things like that. Possibly for shooting medium-quality youtube movies but its nothing highdef(as claimed). 1.2MP is not much in today's world.
Hard drive is kinda slow at 5200 RPM but that doesnt matter too much, just takes longer to write bigger files to the drive. no real big thing only pointing it out
The ugly:
Of course, win8! Its horrible when you first get it, then tolerable when you learn how to deal with it. Its not good, boo on microsoft but im not holding this against samsung. You can tweak in a start bar to get the win7 feel back. Like i said...tolerable, nothing against the PC however since good luck finding any other new PC without win8.
Very minimalistic, stocky design. Its for lack of better words, dull. Quite featureless. No extra buttons for say hot-keying it does have a function keylock which is nice but no hot buttons for web-browser, or turning sound on/off. that sorta thing. As said earlier, a lot of wasted space that could of been filled with goodies but its not a big concern and shouldn't be yours.
No lights for lock keys. If you turn cap-locks on/off. or num or function there is no indicator light anywhere telling you its on. Which is really bad for say passwords where the keys are hidden and you cant figure out why Passw0rd isn't working when you are really typing pASSWRD. stupidity....and i just accidentally knocked open my cd-rom again, the new bane of my existence....ahh white people problems...
The pad can be a bit troublesome to learn its features at first but once you get it down its fine (like using 2 fingers for scroll and its inverted scroll) Im still working on that one.
Summary:
Im sure my review sounded much more harsh and critical than it is but really this is an awesome laptop, most of it was only to make people aware of some of the quirks ive encountered to help them understand what they receive. For me this is perfect. I wanted "the best bang for my buck" and i believe i got just that. for $700 this is an EXCELLENT laptop. Almost a gaming laptop. I truly do recommend this product for anyone seeking for a new laptop that wants a powerhouse on a budget because this product does deliver and samsung does have excellent customer service.
My first impression usng the laptop was how fast it booted and how quiet it was. So far I haven't seen any issues installing the programs I usually use. It's exactly the laptop I wanted.
Then there's Windows 8: at first I hated it, but after delving deeper into it, the new possibilities are definitely intriguing. There are two "realms" in the new windows, the desktop which is the old interface and the app world, which is the new interface. Switching back and forth is cumbersome at first, and the default configuration has you falling out of desktop and into the metro interface quite often. But you can work pretty much the way you used to in Windows 7 by 1) learning the shortcuts, e.g.windows key+d returns you to desktop mode. 2) select desktop applications as default programs for common filetypes (pdf, jpg, mp3, avi, etc) if a metro app is the default you leave desktop mode when opening the object and don't return to desktop when closing. 3) I haven't done this yet, but you can also install one of a number of programs that reinstates the start menu and disables the charms menu. Though the start window is different than the old start menu, the search available there appears to me to do the job, so I will try it out some more before making this move.
What some people might miss: this dvd drive does not support blu ray, and the touch pad does not have an external switch to enable/disable.
All in all, a dream configuration at this price. I'm beginning to like Samsung.I tried many other models of laptops but this one works so great.
The graphics are very vivid, programs run fast, and very silent!
I was really surprised with this laptop since it is not expensive but has so many strength.The laptop works well for a variety of different tasks. I've used it to watch sporting events via the HDMI port and my tv. I also do all of my office work on it as well. Good buy.
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