Just some more questions before i buy Gateway 7811FX

I know someone will say to search, but i have no time for that.

My questions are:

1. Since i heard of over heating problems, will the laptop over heat while watching a movie or tv show?

2. If i buy it, can i do a fresh reformat so i dont have those useless factory installed programs?

3. I have heard many problems with Windows Vista 64bit is that true?

4. Should i wait a few months to buy it or just buy one now?

5. What is the best way to prevent overheating?

 

1. - Mine has never overheated even with the GPU overclocked
2. - Yes of course see the driver thread for drivers
3. - Vista has problems in general, not just the 64-bit version
4. - Unless it goes on sale, i think the price is stable I'd get it now
5. - Don't be stupid. Keep the power brick off the floor and in a open space, don't block the vents, get something to prop the back of it up or a notebook cooler that WORKS (not a cheap $5 walmart special.) I got an Antec notebook cooler for 15" laptops and it works perfect on this laptop.

 

Make sure it is on hard surface with clearance on the sides (especially the left side, where the graphics card fan/ventilation is located). No major tricks needed. It does run hot when gaming, but as long as has been ventilated I have not had any problems. If you search around you can find a notebook cooler, but you will see these usually don't provide a huge difference in temps (mileage will definitely vary).

I've had mine for about a month and love it. Works great, no major issues (even with Vista 64).

 

Basically what the others have said. I've had mine for three weeks and no problems yet. I just deleted the bloatware (wasn't really as much as I had expected) and so far, have been able to run all the programs I used before on Vista 32 and XP.

This includes MS Office 2007 (which obviously should work), Coreldraw 11 (about 3 generations old), Paintshop Pro XI, lots of different open source programs and free downloads for XP, and most importantly, games.

Age of Conan ran at max settings with no issues but has since been replaced with Warhammer Online which is also running at max settings. The fans come on during gaming, but are not very loud at all - well, compared to my old Alienware which sounded like a jet engiine.

The only complaints I have is the poor Draft N wifi speeds which are nowhere near what I got using a pc card adapter and the wifi on/off switch is in the most idiotic place you can imagine - right on the front where it constantly gets bumped off (it should have been recessed or something if they were going to put it there)!

Some folks complain about the 'orange' color, but I see it more as a copper trim and given the cost, I have no issues with it.

Others may have had problems with their machine, but so far, given the short time I have had it and the few complaints I have, I give it a 9.9!

Time will tell...

 

1. I have never had overheating problems with mine, keep in mind that 50% of posts on this forum are in regard to having problems and 50% are regarding how to overclock your 7811, take it for what it is worth...

2. I did not do a fresh format, there were not many useless factory installed programs. It was not like a new Dell, I probably uninstalled 5 or less applications.

3. I love Windows Vista 64 bit, no problems here.

4. Buy one now, or buy one when you can get a good deal on it. Best Buy just ran them for $1250 with a free game, I think they are already back up to $1500 without a game now.

5. I do not have overheating issues with mine, keeping it on a hard surface or putting a cooler underneath would help for sure.

 

1. I've ran Folding@home SMP and Folding@home GPU2 client in parallel over a weekend with zero issues (the back of the laptop was elevated of course). I also ran 3DVantage for 8 hours an no issues.

2. IMHO, no need to do a fresh install. Like others said, the only thing I've uninstalled so far was MS Office. I'll eventually uninstall BigFix and Norton 360, just haven't felt like it or see any reason to do so as of now.

3. I call B.S. I've been running Vista 64-bit for over a year and have had zero issues whereas, Vista 32-bit... format once a month, no joke. If you have a copy of XP, just download Microsoft's Virtual PC (free) and install XP for your apps that still require it. Furthermore, I refuse to ever have to go back to XP! (I've been using XP Pro 32-bit since it was released).

4. The only reason to wait is to see if it goes back on sale. Like some others, I bought mine when it went on sale Labor Day week.

5. Uh, don't block the vents and set it on carpet like they do in ads when using the laptop. As far as the power brick, it just stays under my desk on the carpet 24/7. I've seen no issues with this. As well as if you game, it helps to either prop the back of the laptop up by an inch (Crysis game box works great for this ) or buy a laptop cooler (I have an active cooler (Antec notebook cooler) and a passive cooler (Targus laptop pad that can be folded to allow you to give your keyboard an "angle")).

When you buy it, spend the first few days testing it as much as you can.

 

Now so from what i hear you shouldnt like leave it flat on the carpet while gaming, but what if i am surfing the net or watching some form of movie or Tvshow, would it be ok to leave it flat on the carpet then?

Now i just dont know whether to buy it now? or wait until black friday.

 

Try to never leave it on any soft surface. Just buy a 20in cutting board (for cooking) and set the notebook on it. Its not active cooling, but it will keep your temps WAY down compared to just leaving it on carpet.

With tech you should always buy when you need it, waiting 2 weeks is about all i would ever say wait on a laptop. If you always wait for the next best or the lower price your never going to get it

 

If you block the intakes of any notebook it will overheat. Keep it in a smooth hard surface and you'll be fine. Mine has been through a continuous 6 hour WoW session with teamspeak and mp3 player running while the notebook was sitting in stock form on my desk. No cooler, no back end propping. I try not to pull statistics out of my rear most of the time but I'd have to guess that less then 5% of the 7811 notebooks had overheating issues. It's an enthusiast model aimed directly at the group of users who are most likely to come onto an internet forum and complain.

Vista 64 is really no different then 32 at this point. There are some applications that will not run in a 64 bit environment but that's isn't a vista fault. It's just nature of the beast. Vista is MILES ahead of where it was pre SP1. I won't start another XP vs Vista debate but as a rule people simply don't like change. Don't believe the hype or the Mac commercials. The OS is stable and ready for prime time. It's just not nearly what MS promised it would be. It's XP with a facelift and some nifty new toys, not the second coming of Christ Billy boy made it out to be.

 

There are some great lapdesks out there too. Staples sells a wooden one for 30 bucks that is very solid and has a small but quite adequate cushion underneath. I can put my laptop on it either in the middle or to the side, leaving mousing space.

They've got plastic ones, but the cushions on the bottom aren't sealed, or attached all that well, and when a corner peels up, the tiny plastic balls used for cushioning will leak out everywhere and are a biotch to clean up.

 

So basically, when i first buy the laptop, and try as many games i can to see if it locks up due to over heating and let say it doesnt lock up at all, from hours and hours of PC gaming will that mean my laptop is not one of those defective ones with the over heating problems?

 

Actually i figure you'll be fine just buying one. I think gateway rushed to be the first out of the gates with the centrino 2 platform, and in their rush they sent out a bum product.

Ever since the first run there have been significantly less problems reported, so its back to being a "normal" laptop again.

I would say you can pretty much shop with confidince now, and if you get the 2nd gen run you will probably have RAID enabled (but maybe not)

 

What the hell is exactly RAID, i tried searching for it but no luck, i did find how to check if you have RAID but dont know what exactly RAID is.

 

In the thread "I know its annoying RAID on 7811" there is a listing of the BIOS and of the batch number that the newer machines came with. The ones listed will have RAID and the ones before that will not.

Its a 40+ page thread and i would find you the exact numbers, but alas i'm lazy this morning so you'll have to do the searching yourself.

RAID
Redundant Array of Independant Discs

it basically lets you treat 2 Hard drives as 1 for a significant boost in preformance, or lets you treat 2 Hard drives as 1 for a significant boost in data security
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID


EDIT
Actually im feeling nice
the BIOS Version your looking for is 9c.08.00

 

First off, hello, this is in fact my first post on these forums. I have lurked for a while while I decided to look into buying a 7811FX (which, I did and I'm extremely pleased with it). I finally have decided to actually post something, and it's because I'm amazed by something. I've seen a LOT of intelligence on these forums, and a lot of advanced users that definitely know their stuff, but most people seem to misunderstand exactly what RAID is and how it does or doesn't work.

Many seem to believe that RAID0 is a necessity if you're a performance fiend, and the reality is that for most everything it offers extremely small performance increases, if any. For the situations where the difference does exist, such a small increase is simply not worth it for double the chance of hard drive failure. If you do a lot of gaming (I personally do, and I'd imagine most people buying this laptop will be since its stats are designed for it), many different benchmarks have proven that RAID0 does not offer a single FPS improvement in almost any game. The problem here is that most games do not require constant loading, and instead they are designed to load a game entirely into the RAM (or as much as possible of it) and from there it's up to the GPU/CPU to handle the delivery of FPS. RAID0 only affects the loading of programs, and it does in a very small way.

While you WILL see a difference in how fast programs load (since this is really the only thing RAID0 can affect), it is almost always a negligible amount. Because most programs load within seconds, even a decent percentage decrease in loading time would only be shaving off fractions of seconds, and the majority of programs will not even see that. The following websites have debunked this RAID0 myth, and much more eloquently than I can:

http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000335.html
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101&p=11
http://www.overclockercafe.com/Articles/RAID/index.htm

The list goes on, really. All RAID0 seems to do is give you a very negligible LOADING time decrease, and the only time I've seen such a setup show noticeable increases in performance have been benchmarks (which serve no real purpose besides giving you a number you can compare with other people). All of this comes at the cost of having twice the chance to corrupt all of your files. Even if you constantly make CD/DVD or external HD based back-ups, the reality is it's simply a hassle to have to use them if your hard drive eventually does fail. I, and many others, see absolutely no reason to use RAID0. RAID1 provides an extremely useful tool that many people may want to jump on, but RAID0 provides an almost unnoticeable performance increase with too much risk to be worth such a small reward. If anyone has real world evidence that can prove otherwise I'd love to see it, but when every tech site is showing otherwise it makes me wonder why so many people seem so in love with the idea of it. Am I missing something here?

 

Hi A-Wright. Welcome to the forum.

Just curious about 2 things:
1. How many RAID-0 arrays have you personally set up and run?

2. how many RAID-0 arrays have you personally had fail?

 

Because most programs load within seconds,

Hmmm... like Vista itself (not). Or WoW. Or Crysis. Or UT3. Or...

I think most of us here know exactly how and why RAID 0 works, and about the statistical doubling of the risk of hard drive failure. And like most here I have run RAID on other machines and have found the hard disk performance increase anything but negligible. But welcome to the Forum and enjoy your new 7811!

 

Hello! I've never ran a RAID0 (due to prior reading, I never saw the point), however I have seen someone's running side by side with my own PC (which was, at the time, almost the exact same specs) and I noticed no real difference. No one I've seen who has done testing on traditional programs has seemed to notice any discernible difference (save, of course, benchmark programs that only serve to do benchmarks and not show real world effects), and I've never seen any evidence that most any program will benefit from having RAID0. To answer your second question, I've never personally had any fail but I also don't understand how that would support or invalidate my comments. My experiences most obviously do not match everyone else's (which is why I was interested in seeing if anyone had evidence that proved contrary to what I've seen), so even if I had two RAID0 setups fail immediately that wouldn't necessarily mean that my experiences were typical. There are far too many outside factors to a question such as that for anyone to go purely off my response as an indication of what to expect.

Having said as much though, I don't mean my comments as an insult to anyone. I am solely interested in learning, and as such I am attempting to understand why so many people here seem to be so pro RAID0 when my reading has led me to being against it. If someone can show me a bigger difference than what I've seen, I would be more than happy to acknowledge it.

 

My experiences seem to differ from yours. I've finished Crysis and have been playing WoW since it came out. Crysis loads in around 4 seconds, and WoW boots up in roughly 2. I just now tried to load into Stormwind and it took about 3-4 seconds as well, and I'm using the stock hard drive installed. I have no bloatware running and usually only have Trillian, mIRC and Rightmark CPU Utility running. While I do consider myself to be somewhat of an impatient person, the load times for all of the games you listed (minus UT3, not a fan of the Unreal series) has never been so much as to bother me. Much like many of you, I've been using computers since before Windows existed, and on my laptop Vista seems to load faster than any other OS I've had (save Linux, but Linux is also some kind of crazy demon magic made by people far more savvy than I). The only program I could see loading faster would be Vista, but considering Vista seems to load faster than the time it takes me to get to my kitchen I just can't imagine that shaving a second or two off the load would appease me greatly.

Do you happen to have this laptop, or an earlier model? Have you ran programs under no RAID, noting the time, and then tried it with RAID0? Did you notice a substantial difference? Obviously I can't really argue with your experiences but I can say that all of what you listed (once again, save UT3) seems to load in a few seconds for me without RAID0. If you've recently tested them side by side I would love to know what differences you noticed. If you're going from a slower PC with less RAM and no RAID to a newer PC with a faster CPU and more RAM, then there would be a lot more outside factors to program loading speed than simply RAID0. I'm sure you can understand that, when faced with empirical evidence from a myriad of hardware sites/forums that is contrary to your own beliefs, I'm forced to side with them instead of "well I've seen it and it's a lot better".

 

@A-Wright
First welcome to the NBR forums, may your stay be enjoyable and educational (it have been both for me)

As to RAID.
I have used and whole heartedly believe in both of the basic RAID arrays (As i feel that everything but RAID 1 and RAID 0 are just adaptations of the same basic principle)

As to the preformance gains made by RAID 0 they will never give you a frames per second increase in a game...hard drives have absolutly nothing to do with that aspect of a computers function. What RAID 0 does give you is faster load times, faster boot times (even if marginally) and much better transfer rates.

Its a diffrent area of preformance that a computer can have, that has very little to do with gaming ability (which is GPU/CPU dependant)

The easiest way to see the increase in preformance is to transfer about 45 gigs worth of data with a RAID 0 set up and with out one. You will save ALOT of time with the RAID due to the about 40% faster write times (being able to use 2 disks instead of one)

A prime example, to copy my Music file to one of my spare internal HDD (45.2) gigs took about 3 hours, but once i set up my raid and transfered it back i was able to finish the transfer in just over 2 hours. Thats a pretty significant difference.

My numbers arent exact as i didnt think to get actual times so they are rounded a bit, so feel free to disbelieve my example, but RAID 0 does give a nice free preformance boost to a computers hard drive.

As to the instability... hard drives fail, its a part of life. Thats where back ups come in. You should ideally do a daily back up, but a weekly one is usually just as good for most users. The sad point is that "most" people never back their data up so a RAID crash is a horrible thing. If you have back ups then its not really that big of a deal.

If you want free security then you run RAID 1 so both of your drives act as one but the slave drive is a mirror image of the master drive so if one fails the other can take over as if nothing happened. And the neat thing is while you have the same write times as a single drive you do still get a small boost in read preformance due to the two drives can still be read from at the same time (its not a large boost but it is measurable)

 

Desktops I like buying a couple cheap drives and RAID them. Raptor performance for a few bucks. And yes the performance of loads and transfers is evident. Plus makes me feel superior (always a plus).

Laptop ... not yet but seems 2 less expensive 5400's @RAID-0 would approach 2 separate 7200's. It's always price/performance with me.

It's just interesting that most anti RAID BS here always comes from people with ZERO experience with RAID.