I've had this computer for 5 months with no issues. I looked at HP, Sony, Apple, and Asus. I wanted a quality high performance laptop to replace a desktop unit. I don't want to watch movies on my computer that's why I own two nice large TV's, so 15.5" screen is perfect. I feel it's very portable, it fits into a normal briefcase and allows a full size keyboard with numerical keypad. This unit has a separate video card and a hi-rez screen so the picture is excellent. Audio is marginal as are all laptops. I really like the wi-fi performance, very fast downloading of web pages. One of the main reasons I bought this model is the USB 3. I bought two outboard 2 TB drives to store photos and music, very fast loading of huge files as well as perfect playback of large audio files when I hook up to the stereo system. Over the months of researching computers I read many reviews of people criticizing units for noisy fans and excessive heat. This thing has never even gotten warm so I'm not sure if it has a fan! Remarkable when you realize it's running a quad core i-7, 6 GB of memory with another gig on the video card. My HP (company unit) has a fan and it comes on regularly. I do have one criticism, the touchpad is off center relative to the keys which means that as you type you need to lift your right hand/thumb or the page will scroll or the cursor moves. Speaking of the touchpad, it's one of those multitouch jobs so you can pinch, scroll, rotate, etc., very cool. I bought this at BestBuy and the geek squad tech told me that there were fewer returns and repairs on Samsung laptops than any of the brands they carry. Well, we'll see, knock knock knock on wood. Bottom line, I'm very happy with this computer and I'm very difficult to please!
The processor is fast and I have had a few issues with screen freezes, but I too believe that is a windows fault not the computer itself. I think this dropped down to the low price due to a new series of Samsung laptops being released... bu i expect this to last me a minimum of 5 years. Im very happy with it.When I first received this laptop, I was expecting a very heavy-duty, powerhouse machine that would likely never leave my desk. To my suprise, this machine has ended up being amazingly portable, sleek, and nice to use. The features are great, and the amount of fully-licensed included software is incredible. I can encode and burn DVD's within a couple hours, watch movies from my hard drive in 1080p on my TV using the inbuilt HDMI port, and even get WiFi anywhere in my city using the inbuilt WiMax adapter (if you pay for a 4g service, that is). Sometimes my PC still does freeze though, but I'm going to blame that on Windows and the sheer number of applications that I keep running at all times. Speedboot is a real blessing for me on the go, but be aware that it causes many sensitive applications to crash while using it. Gaming wasn't as nearly as great as expected, but I barely play any gpu-intensive games anyways so it's pretty good for the basics. I had some problems playing MineCraft :D but once again I'm going to blame it on Windows.
Overall, I'm really happy I bought this machine, and would definitely recommend it to others. When I bought it, it was for $900 and I thought I got a great deal...so at $600, it's definitely a steal!!We are on our second laptop of this model (RC512-S02) The first one was returned after two days of it crashing and shocking us when touched. It was apparent the power connection was loose and causing the problem. The second identical one worked well for several months and now this one is shocking and crashing as well. It is a random thing and it will now go back for a laptop from a different manufacturer . It is a shame as this is a fast computer and appears well made but it is not reliable. The original model S01 wss recalled by Samsung over the problem with the Intel CPU error. We have all Samsung appliances in our kitchen and love them but this is not up to Samsung's standards. After talking with Samsung tech support their advice was to return it.This is really a one-compromise (I'll get to that in a minute) value; and the one compromise is quite small if you really want to get around it. In short, this is a really rounded out quality laptop. Here are a few things I like about it:
-Build Quality: This thing is a tank! I've test-dropped it once on a well-carpeted area and accidentally dropped mine on a hard-wood floor, and not even a chip has come off of the plastic. The shell is a combo aluminum-plastic assembly and holds up quite well to damage. No damage to the optical drive as well. There's also a bit of shock absorption around the hard drive. MacBook owners will know that aluminum is a strong metal, and the plastic on the shell is thick, weighty, and quality plastic. Great build.
-Hardware: You can read the list. All quality, all fast, all powerful. The only thing I have a tiny bit of concern about is the Intel Wifi chip inside. This will make running Linux harder for a first timer, but Googling around will assist you in finding a driver. Optimus won't work with Linux from what I hear anyway; this really is a laptop designed for Windows. Feel free to comment in case I'm wrong however!
-Software: Believe it or not, the amount of crud is actually pretty low on this machine. However, I'm a big fan of a clean Windows installation, so I wiped the hard drive and ran a clean installation. This gave me a speed boost of about 10%. Be sure to use the recovery software to burn a driver disk before doing this though, or download the drivers to an external disk.
-Recovery: Recovery is made simple through the self-booting recovery partition. Since I bought it, I cloned the recovery partition and moved it to another drive; and hammering the "Boot Recovery Partition" key during boot still works, even on an external hard drive. A nice touch. Don't worry if you mess something up, it can be easily restored. Restoration takes a bit of time though.
The two minor things I don't like about this machine:
-Display: The display on this thing, when things are set to defaults, is garbage. 1600x900 would have been a bit more preferable, but even worse than resolution; this thing has very little contrast right out of the box. Using Intel's graphics hardware control panel, you can adjust contrast and gamma to your liking; but initial impressions were quite low for me. Also, there is a HDMI port, so you can hook up an external monitor.
-Optical Drive: Yeah, it's a Blu-Ray drive; which is great for reading huge swaths of data (and the games are inevitably going either Blu-Ray or direct download). However, this drive is really slow. I read into this and found out it's just an issue with Blu-Ray drives in general. Again, feel free to correct me in the comments. I don't consider this to be a "point off" the rating, it's just a minor nit-pick.
Personal usage/experience:
-"Daily" Stuff: Web browsing, watching videos, listening to music, all pretty decent on this machine. The lower resolution makes it tough to multitask (as in, putting windows by windows), but I'm generally not in the mood to multitask on a smaller screen anyway. The speakers are pretty good for built-in laptop speakers; and as noted before, watching videos works well after changing the color settings. The Core i7/Intel integrated graphics actually give pretty good battery life too, I get roughly 3 hours and 45 minutes to 4 hours and 30 minutes.
-Gaming: Here's where low resolution actually comes in handy. You can maximize all settings on your games and chances are, your framerates will be very good! The only slowdowns I have encountered were DirectX 9 games designed to push the technology and the very latest games. However, turning stuff down from "very high" to "high" does not have that much of a visual effect on games today, and this is good news.
-Media Rendering: This thing is also beastly when it comes to media and content creation. The chipset inside allows programs to tap into the integrated graphics processing built into the CPU as well as use the dedicated Nvidia chipset to assist in rendering. It competes favorably with my year-old desktop, which is a Core i5 setup with a GTX 275 graphics card. No complaints here.
All in all, if you can get this thing for under $800, it's a great value.
0 comments:
Post a Comment