My 1520 arrived today

Well, happy days, my order seems to have been brought forward, and after a bit of complaining and hassling, my delivery came today, on the 3rd, as opposed to the originally said 10th.

Firstly, wow. What a gorgeous laptop. I think everyone's main concern is grainyness. Well, I have the 1440x900 display with the whole... WSXGT + or whatever it's called, and I can confirm that the screen is absolutely beautiful. If I do have grainyness, I certainly can't see it.

When I turned it on at first, I was impressed. I didn't realise that the screen was only at half brightness when on battery power, so when it burst into life when I inserted the power lead, it blew me away, it really is great.

Strangely, I got the blue screen of death on my first start up, but after restarting I have had no problems whatsoever. Vista is very exciting and working well; my SanDisk Cruzer Crossfire and Logitec laser mouse both worked, plug and play, right off the bat, and I even was able to boost the system memory with ready boost.

As for performance, I can't say yet. I am currently installing Medieval 2 Total War, and will report back with the results.

The keyboard is a joy to use, and the rest of the laptop is really stunning.

As for negatives... hard to say really. Vista navigation is a little different to XP, so I am still trying to figure out what does what. Also, the pertruding 9-cell battery makes fitting it into my notebook backpack a VERY tight squeeze, but it manages it.

Oh yeah, I have also noticed nothing from any headphone sockets, so not really sure what that is all about. I DO have the next-gen wireless card though, maybe that's it.

Speaking of the wireless card, I have been able to connect to my home wireless network instantly with no trouble whatsoever. I don't have bluetooth, but there were not rogue bluetooth settings that messed anything up, I was on right away.

the only other thing I can think of is bloatware. There is a lot of it, and I am still working on what to uninstall and what is necessary.

That's about it for now, any questions? I'll be happy to answer them if I can.

My specs:

T7300 2.0GHZ Processor
8600M GT GFX
2GB Ram
1440-900 widescreen, truelife screen
Vista Home Premium

Thanks

 

UPDATE: Well, after installing, I set the M2TW settings at full, including 8x Anti Aliasing and 16x Antriscopic Filtering, full shadows and shading, highest on all texture details.

the results are very good. I could play with two full sized armies at a very respectable FPS. Not quite flawless, but very easily playable and acceptable. Performance has blown me away frankly.

 

Could you check which display you have got? You can do this in Device Maanger - Montiro - Generic PnP monitor - Details - Hardware Ids.

 

MONITOR\CMO1538

Hope that helps.

 

Hope your havin fun One of the things keeping me from the 1440x900 was the grainyness issue but it seems like thats been resolved, or you just got lucky But have you used 1280x800 before? Do you like 1440 over 1280? I'm just wondering because I did have a laptop that was in 1280 and I loved the resolution, I thought it was perfect and I don't want to risk picking out a resolution I might not like.

 

My Demension desktop uses a flascreen 1280x800, and I do like it, but to be honest, after using 1440x900, I won't go back.

I honestly don't know about the grainyness, I don't know if it's because I'm in the UK, or got an "August batch", or what, but as far as I can tell, the screen is great. Very sharp, the black is very black and the white is very white. My mother came to have a look and said instantly how amazing the screen was.

Who knows, maybe I DID just get lucky, but I can safely say that my 1440x900 truelife screen does NOT have any noticable grainyness.

Cheers

 

Thanks If you did get lucky I hope I get lucky to I'm ordering my 1520 right now with 1440x900.

 

You won't regret it, I can already tell I that I am goingto adore this laptop. Good luck, enjoy it.