Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
OK, I went to Best Buy early Sunday morning (who knew that they did not open until 11am on Sundays?) to get my P7811FX. For the 1st time ever, I painlessly bought a laptop from BB. No trying to get me to buy an extended warranty, no trying to get me to let their "techs" upgrade the drivers - it was like shopping at a real store.
My salesman was a total geek who was excited for ME getting this laptop. He was incredulous when I told him I did not game, I just needed a really fast laptop to view **** and surf the net. I took Guild Wars "Eye of the North" expansion pack as my free game, so this only made me look even less like a serious gamer.
I had downloaded the driver pack from another thread on this forum the night before, so I cleared all the partitions on the HD, created just one large partition and installed Vista x64. Why? To be sure the registry was clear of any pesky spyware, Norton 30 day popups, or anything else secretly running in the background.
Vista installed w/o a hitch. Sound was already installed by Windows. Windows did not have a network driver, so make sure you already have that drivers disc before you reformat, otherwise you will not be able to get on the net to download any drivers.
Having the speakers on top, reflecting sound off of the screen seems to make more sense, rather than my old 17" laptop where the speakers emit from the front lip. Sound was loud and clear, although I would rather have a thumbwheel rather than a touch pad for a volume control. It has a dedicated MUTE switch, so that helps a lot when the phone rings.
Web cam works great even in very low light conditions. It has a little blue light to tell you when its on, so you don't forget and embarrass yourself.
The harddrive light flickers every few seconds even if nothing is running. I could not find a reason for this.
The fan on the video chip occasionally throttles up and down even with no programs running. Sometimes 3 times in a row then it sits quietly for 15 minutes. No big deal, but odd.
My Kensington trackball (they call it an Expert "Mouse") would not not detect on any of the left side USB ports. The single right hand port detected it immediately. This makes the trackball sit 2" away because it touches the USB plug.
Installed Crysis and let it detect the appropriate settings. It chose everything graphically "HIGH". AA was OFF. I adjusted the resolution to the native laptop resolution and played.
It ran for 20 minutes and locked up solid. The laptop was crazy hot on the left hand side. I rebooted, this time propping up the rear of the computer with a book to give it more airflow than my desk allows. It ran flawlessly for 4 hours until I went to bed.
This means you will not be able to play graphically intensive games with the laptop flat on a table. There is just not enough airflow. Prop it up, or stack up some rubber feet on the bottom to increase the clearance. In bed I'll use a notebook cooler, but I had to do that with my old laptop anyway.
Guild Wars refused to install from Autorun, or even manually. I could not even get to the install splash screen. It would try to start, then crap out with an error on drive D. Finally I rebooted with the disc in the drive and the install splash screen came up by itself. Strange. Needless to say, GW runs with everything turned up all the way and the computer is barely warm.
That's all for now, just wanted to share my experiences if anyone else was thinking about getting one before the sale is over.
vid
Overall P7811FX experience and mini review
Discussion in 'Gateway and eMachines' started by vid1900, Sep 2, 2008.
