Words just words... after three days with a refurb M11X

After four days or so I have to say This little Napoleon(w/A03 BIOS) has been a joy to have....As you can see where I have it. I replaced a huge silver 17' Inspiron which suits itself better on a desk in the kitchen. The AW sits upon a black magazine holder I bought that is laying sideways on the coner of the end table. The opening below (where the mags are kept) stores extra stuff like my DVD burner and exta disk drives, etc.



In relation to the room. it is nearly invisible..

the room , it doesn't stand out...

'When it arrived, with great trepedation I opened the sparse box and found a "new refurb" Nary a mark (although now that it is in my hands that will change). I am not a anal person about my 'stuff." The first thing I did as would anyone is boot it up and see if it actually would boot into Windows.........It did. Mildly surprised. I did not do the "paper test" but my screen is open 90% 0f the time and it stays on the same. If I do close it I use a couple eye glass cleaning cloths on the keyboard as the screen to my dissapointment is not glass like the 17....But I knew that. It is a samsung and looks very very good and sharp. I did lower the resolution and it still looked great. (The benifits of small real estate screens) No dead or worse bright pixels.


I then used it for a day " stock" before messing around. I found no issues (except facial recognition would freeze and I could not enter my PW. Had to hard shutdown a few times and go into safe mode..Not a big deal becasue I find it gimmickly anyway.

I first loaded all the new Nvidia drivers and the new .inf file mention in one of the threads. No problem there. Messed around with the OC and the Program that OCs the GPU whch gave me lock up issues so I unloaded it (for now).

Then I loaded my copy of Windows Ultimate (love that Bit Locker) ad nary an whimper. All loaded fine right over the Home. No activation needed.

One major dissapointment is Mozilla Forefox does not play nice with Win 64........No Adobe 64 bit flash apparently. All kinds of issues there so I am using IE for now until I get that figured out. I am used to Mozilla but IE has a lot of the same things so maybe I will grow to like it. Going to try Safari, Chrome is to featureless.

The keyboard is a bit cramped but I type at maybe 10 words a minute so.....Spell check is my friend. 99% of my spulling mistakes are a result of my tepid at best typing skills.

Batteylife is 100% all the time LOL I will rarely will use it on the battery. Going from 100GB to 250GB was like gong from a Civic to an Accord in space. I used Windows disk management to create another logical drive of about 60GB for back up of My Documents in case I need to reinstall the OS.

There are 19 BG operations in my tray.....and still no hiccups. The program that shows mw when the GPU is switched to dedicated does its job on HD You Tube Vids. So I know Optimus is working well.

Blue Tooth locked in with My Nokia N97 and all features were available.

As far as gaming goes.....well I have not loaded or played a game on it yet. That was not the primary reason I bought this. Although I did do a little video editing in Vegas. Faster than my E1705 in that regard but I really have not put it to the test. I can tell already audio will be walk in the part. Dam dell for not using TI firewire. J Micron is junk for Audio. But USB works.

All in all this puppy was money well spent. If I get a year or two out of it I will be happy. At that time there will be far more powerful small notebooks to choose from. I use this in my lap and the intake is still not covered up and the heat is no existant for basic browsing and video watching.

Next up. The installation of Nokia suite and iTunes............

Things I need to know or should try would be nice to read. I would like to create a bootable USB recorvery stick. I already have Win 7 Ultimate on one and will add the Dell Drivers four all four Dells we have. But I would like a factory recorvery disc so I can delete the recorvery partition which as I have read sometimes even works.


BTW Those who have some hesitaion buying refurbs should'nt. Yes I was frustrated in sending an M17X and an far less so sending a M15X back in the last couple months (what was I thinking with that 17" beast?) I have to say Dell is very good about returning bad or otherwise unsatisfactory units. When you finally get a good one. it will last and you will be glad you saved hundreds $$$, especially when the inevitable new better faster lappy arrives sooner than you think. I came from the beginning a couple months ago looking at Asus g73 (lots of early adopter issues) the MSI GT/GX660 (very nice machine (very questionable service) The Sager 8760 Great reputation built on Compal (as was or maybe still is) built by Compal....But in the end I decided I already have a very upgradable desktop with a 27" and two 19" screens and really need a "couch potatoe" netbook


What better netbook than a $600 and change M11X?

 

Thanks for the review.

Why did you get rid of the m15x and m17x, out of curiosity? I can understand size being a factor with the m17x, but one thing you take a big hit on with the m11x is the screen size and power.

I am very happy with my m11x R1, but I do think about selling it at some point and getting a m15x. I don't even need the power, really, but the bigger screen would be nice. I've been playing a lot of D&DO lately (don't laugh, it's fun!), and a lot of the icons and such are hard to see on that 11" screen.

 

I have a home music Recording Studio where my desktop lives with a 27" and two 19" screens. That home built unit is the "power unit" in my house. I can run anything on that and I have not upgraded the Q6600 to an i7 yet (waiting for Sandy Bridge) And another desktop in that room as a Desk office machine . I wanted a machine for the space pictured and the M17X is was too large and had issues. BUt even the M15X was too big. The screen is larges enough for my needs. I won;t play many games on it (however I do play some games on an iTouch so I cannot complain about an 11" screen really). LOL

I wanted the most powerful netbook and portable DAW I could get and the M11X fit the bill. I don't want a gaming notebook but then agian I am not in school work part time and am mostly home. IF I lived in a Dorm or small Apt I would probably get theS ager or M17X for sure. I will load FSX on the machine this week and see how that works. If FSX has good frame rates most games should although FSX is processor Dependant just as much.

Where the machine is I have a PS3, Wii and an Xbox so if I want to game in the net or home I use the TV.

 

The standard 32bit Firefox has no problem with Flash on any 64bit OS. You're going to want to give that another shot...

 

"You might be on this page because you can't view content with the Flash Player. This is likely because your computer is running a 64-bit Web browser on a 64-bit operating system and you are trying to install Flash Player. Flash Player does not run in most 64-bit browsers. If you attempt to download the Flash Player in a 64-bit browser that does not support Flash Player, you will see a message from Adobe and a link back to this page. To install Flash Player, use a 32-bit Web browser on your 64-bit operating system. All major browsers are available in 32-bit versions and the Internet Explorer 32-bit browser is the default browser on Windows 64-bit systems."

This is what i read. I am going to install Firefox again (32bit) and see if i can make it work with Adobe flash. I think it defaulted to the 64 bit version.

 

Arrr the O'l E1705 - fantastic laptop in it's day - upgradeable, fast, played all the games and cheap.............

Yep remember her well - had mine for 3 years modded the case, fitted 7950GTX graphic's card then finally parted ways.

Still I'm now loving the M11x - mine is R1 need the VGA port but in all it is of equal performance of the old E1705

 

Got Mozilla to work.....

every once in a while i have to hard start the machine because the mouse/pad pointers cannot select anything after opening a progrsam...or sometimes cannot open anything in the tasskbar.....Strange

another issue just popped up

"BT stack cannot be opened"..

So here we go.........The more little issues I have to more I am glad I did not pay more than $650 for this thing. I have not had to start a PC in safe mode this many times in a day ever on any machine i ever own I have started in safe mode on this machine today more than all machines combined trying to solve little issues. Mostly software.

 

Too bad it's not your M11x you can blame. Software is software, and if you are pushing to x64 versions of a lot of software, you will run into a lot of issues.
There are some good contenders out there, but stick to the 32-bit versions for now you'll have much better luck.

I wouldn't blame any issues you have on the M11x from what I hear.

 

Ye love at the first sight, I agree. It'd be actually more interesting to see some reviews from people who owned it for 4-5 months... actually I could write one up.

 

No it is all software related. I am used to that. I have had to reinstall all my OS once a year to clean the machines out. I load up so much "tryware" I don;t use Nero I prefer the smaller gBurner. Simple DVD recording Software has become so bloated with crapware. I have Sony's DVD Architect for serious stuff. All the Sony stuff is great Sound Forge, Vegas, ...Love it.

This is my second bout with 64 bit Windows. My first attempt was on my Studio desktop.......Did not play nice with some audio ASIO drivers software synths and plug ins, so I went back to 32 Bit until the SW makers make 64 bit versions that can access more memory.

I won;t be using that kind of software to that extent on this guy. So I will give 64 bits a run until I find it causes more issues than it solves.