P-7811FX First Impressions

Got my P-7811FX from Best Buy last night and finally got to fooling around with it. After cleaning out the bloatware which wasn't much (games, Office trial, Norton 360, Gateway's BigFix, etc.) and loading my own content and programs on, I have a few obeservations. It was dated 8/25/08 and had the newest BIOS running, which was a plus (btw, Best Buy's geek squad didn't trip about wanting to expect it. He said as long as I paid 1st, I could open it up, and if it was not the correct BIOS, he would try another one from the back).

First off, I really like the orange/rust trim. We have an Alienware m9750 and this thing has a hell of a llot more style then that. The quality seems excellent and there's no light leakage from the screen, nor any apparent defects. I do have a few issues with some of the design choices: I'm not a fan of the position of the Function key (becoming more and more common, apparently); the shrunken sizes of the Right Shift key and the Directional arrows; the media buttons aren't touch-sensitive, but they don't have the feel of actual buttons, which is a little annoying because i can't tell when they've been properly depressed. And the lack of a touchpad on/off togle Function is just mind-bottling (^_^) as it can only be disabled via software. No built-in Bluetooth, FTL.

I love the placement of the external ports, and don't have any issues with the optical drive, which I plan to upgrade to a blu-ray player. 3 USB ports seems mediocre, but the eSATA is a god-send. I also found the memory card read a lot more responsive than the one in my m9750.

Performance wise, everything is great so far. First time using Windows Vista (64-bit). So far everything seems good, even games, but my old purchased versions of Nero 7 and a few other big programs had lots of compatibility issues. Most of these have been resolved, but still a work in progress. I will state that I absolutely HATE this **** User Account Control bull****!

The games are blistering fast. I haven't thrown any benchmarking software at it yet, but I can say that the games (Mass Effect, Crysis, Call of Duty 4) run much better than on the Alienware. Undervolted the notebook to 1.0125/0.9500/0.9250 and temps dropped by a good 7-8 degrees, and that's without my Zalman NC2000 notebook cooling pad.

The next step is to overclock the GPU a little and then get a 2nd hard drive and RAID it. I am extremely happy with this purchase (and love that battery life, by the way), and I don't understand how Gateway is able to squeeze all of this stuff in here and still turn a profit at a price of $1,250. This thing is greatly underpriced, but I'm glad they did it! It was selling out fast, I had to call 4 Best Buys in Sacramento to find one.

 

for the part of user account control I recommend disabling it.

 

Funny thing is that I did and rebooted, but somehow it kept popping up even though it was disabled. I restarted again and it hasn't been back since. It's really annoying and useless. I've also disabled blocking of unsigned drivers. I'm updated the video drivers to 177.92.

Seriously...is there no Touchpad toggle on this thing?? Am I just missing it or something? lol

 

is there or will there be a blu-ray drive for this? or are you talking about getting an external (would make it very inconvenient for portability)?

and i'm surprised you didn't mention anything about the sound.. if there is one thing hugely disappointing about this laptop it's the atrocious sound system. the output is barely audible if there's any ambient noise whatsoever

 

Well, I normally use my headphones, so the low-quality speakers don't bother me that much - but yes, they suck, and the volume limit is too low; I don't think there are subwoofers.

Supposedly there are Blu-Ray drives that are compatible with the P-7811FX on eBay that run ~$200. I haven't started looking yet, but someone on this forum pointed it out the other day.

 

Welcome to the club!

 

You could use Dell or whatever driver with the auto turn TP off with mouse connection feature.

In case you hadn't thought of doing it that way.

 

I just saw the thread on that and tried it. It worked find, but a few instances of unplugging my Logitech VX Revolution did not result in the Touchpad turning back on. I actually had to plug it in and unplug 3 times before the touchpad would automatically turn back on.

 

Your experience seems vastly different to what I had on mine - read here. I had purchased my P-7811FX about a month ago and was still going through those older units, you've got the revised baby with the newer bios, modified underside and raid capability.

I second your issues with the keyboard concerning the FN key and cursor keys. I'm so used to a full-size right shift key and having normal-sized cursor keys right below them.

I'm not too hung up about it not having a trackpad on-off button, what does bug me is that there is no activity LED for the optical drive - a problem if you're burning discs. (Easy to solve though - just drill a tiny hole in the bezel where the drive LED is and pop in some clear plastic).

My troubles with the P-7811FX units I was going through (backlight bleeding, lock-ups) may have been attributed to an early manufacturing flaw that Gateway has since fixed - I have not heard any problems mentioned on the posts here from folks having newer units (so far).

While my purchase of the Gateway was to have replaced an older laptop for both gaming and work use, considering the current $1250 price ($1449 when I bought mine) it would make sense for me to keep one just as a gaming rig. My budget would allow me to buy a smaller, second laptop better suited for work/non-gaming and not have to make too big a compromise.

I've looked around - the HDX18 from HP is great but the 9600M GT in it sucks. The X305 from Toshiba also sucks because of it's low-resolution 1440x900 screen. I'll put up with the crummy speakers on the Gateway, and maybe the keyboard too, as long as they can deliver a product that works as advertised.

I think if Gateway can fix the build issues with it's products and provide timely bios updates, the unit may be worth a second look for me. I'm in no hurry right now so I'm gonna hold out for the next few weeks and months to see what else comes down the pipeline from the other guys.

 

Hmm... is there any way to get a "newer" P-7811FX from Gateway since I'm passed the 14 day return policy with Best Buy? After reading the actually review for this notebook and seeing Kevin gaming on his laptop without a notebook cooler and not having to worry about the GPU cooking itself has sounded like a lot less hassle than what I go through now, granted, it hasn't bothered me too much.