just picked up a gateway fx p7811 from best buy.

wow! so far so good. cost 1300 even + taxes. think i got one of the last ones... i know theese have been discontinued.

things i like:

screen quality
color lid graphic
impressed with it size. would not really be that bad to take on a trip or once or twice a month to college. its really thin for its power.
keyboard- really solid

have not tested most things.im sure the performance will be flawless, and thats whats most impotant.

things i hate so far:

optical drive is very loud
orange color schem ? why?
touch buttons / volume slider- pointess , ugly , almost never working as they should. also there is flex near them
only 3 usb ports?
no dvi out- i know hdmi is dvi but i think there should just be dvi and no vga (since adapters for that are like 50 cents)
speakers loose quality at max volume
no bluetooth- yet they put the button thier to torement you, fingerprint, or blu ray burner.
battery sticks out back
pretty much flex everywhere
going to take some time to get use to this small res.

 

yeah, you must've gotten lucky, seeing how they're no longer sold/stocked. weren't you considering the m17x though?

 

the m17, specs that matched the gateway= almost 2200 after tax and shipping. plus 1 month of waiting.

 

things i hate so far:

optical drive is very loud


True


orange color schem ? why?

The orange matches with the black so I dont really see a problem here


touch buttons / volume slider- pointess , ugly , almost never working as they should. also there is flex near them


Flex near them? Dont touch that area. Also you can make the keys work with any program with a registry fix


only 3 usb ports?

The standard on a laptop is 4-6, I think you can live with 3.


no dvi out- i know hdmi is dvi but i think there should just be dvi and no vga (since adapters for that are like 50 cents)

Adapters are cheap like you said


speakers loose quality at max volume

No problems with that over here. Are you sure you are playing a good quality soundfile, I play WAV at 44100HZ ripped from a Audio CD and sounds perfect


no bluetooth- yet they put the button thier to torement you, fingerprint, or blu ray burner.


Bluetooth can be added internally or USB, so not a big deal, Fingerprint readers are useless just have a really strong password, Blu Ray Burner? The thing is 1200ish, You can upgrade cheap in the future if you wait


battery sticks out back


This is a not a problem at all, Who looks at the back, you have a giant 17 inch screen infront of you. the extra space in the back is for a 9 cell battery, If you want you can downgrade to a 6 cell battery and save your little space


pretty much flex everywhere


Stop feeling up on the laptop or of course it will flex, Its pretty solid


going to take some time to get use to this small res.


Small res? I dont think so. 1920x1200 on a 17 inch is perfectly fine, Looks great. Small text? Then switch it to 1680 or a lower one.



It is a GREAT LAPTOP for its price, for its price you should not really be complaining. Enjoy your new laptop!

 

dude what did you expect for the price? you could pay the extra $900 and get "better build quality" etc, but you got a hell of a laptop, congrats.

 

calm down , are you a rep from gateway??? because i never saw such an epic denfese. i dont see that your gaining from defending gateway...nevertheless yeah im very happy with the laptop. no dealbreaker problems. it can max unreal 3 and thats really all i need right now. thanks to the forum for suggesting the machine, i told my friend to get it months ago, he recently scrunged up the money lying around and said its a great pc (well his last computer was from 2003). i think every notebook gamer should own this laptop. now to play some unreal

 

Btw, if the small res. is bothering you much.. you might want to increase the DPI - might make a difference for you.

 

I just picked mine up last night. I jumped up from a Dell i9300
I had a glossy 17" 1920x1200 and could not accept anything less, when I found this deal I was pumped, until I realized that it was discontinued. I was previously looking at a Refurbished XPS 1730, but my friend found a Qoismo for 999, the lack of 1920x1200 killed it for me, and if the OP thinks the P-7811FX is ugly, check this beast out:

Go look at the Toshiba Qoismo x305, being a newbie I found out I can't post pics from url's... explore.toshiba.com/laptops/qosmio

That's all tight like a JDM civic YO! I don't overclock it I just add some NAAAWWWWWWZZZZ...

Yeah anyways...

I found it online and compared it and learned that Bestbuy still had some in stock. I was origonally going to buy a new laptop in Dec/Jan, but this deal could not wait. $1359 was cheaper than any competition, but.....

The best thing about this laptop? I rang out and the total was $1159, $200 cheaper than I was expecting, go see if you can get $200 back because it has been less than 30 days.

the only dislikes are:
3 USB, the Dell has 6
The Fn key is to the left of the ctrl key, I keep hitting it instead of ctrl,
the tiny right shift key
The gateway bloatware (the reason I joined NBR Forums, how to remove it)


But ****, $1159, about $400 cheaper than a refurbed 1730 and more powerful. Jumping up from a 6800go has been great, now I can play games I didn't think I could.

 

Great laptop all around. It's not without it's problems like you pointed out, though. But it's probably the best bang for your buck out there (well, assuming you can find one)

Congrats!

 

I am currently using the search tool to figure out how to remove all the gateway crap. Anyone know a specific thread?

I would like to try to do it w/o reformatting, but I can do that. The problem I hate about companies today is that they won't just give you a standard windows disc, noooo you have to have all of their crap there on it too.

 

the easiest way...use add/remove programs in control panel. If it doesnt look like you'd need it, remove it. Don't get crazy and start removing NVIDIA control panel, or Intel Chipset Drivers or anything. But, the gateway crap is fairly obvious. And, if you have any doubts about removing one, then Google it and make sure you know what it is, and does. It takes bout 30 minutes to uninstall it all. And, ya may decide to keep some of it..so dont rely on an external program to make up your mind for you by removing it. The first one I removed was BigFix - what a waste of time that thing is.

 

yeah, I think I got most of the crap off there, now time to remove Nvidia!















and install some tweaked drivers

I was trying to get all and any gateway crap off, but I settled at the largest most obtrusive programs.

Thanks for the reply.

 

installing bloatware is part of the business. i myself haven't gotten the time yet, but i would suggest backing up the drivers and doing a clean install of vista. norton 360 is a real nag.
my previos comp. came with xp and a whole lot of bloatware, which i simply just add/removed. people were quite surprised cause the comp. ran slower then it should have for the specs. when i clean installed vista, the comp. actually ran and felt faster then xp.

 

Just curious as I have finally opened mine up and started playing with it.

That Windows Experience Index score. What should the stock out of the box 7811FX do.

I was surprised that it only scored 5.2?

My scores

CPU 5.2
RAM 5.9
Graphics 5.9
Gaming Graphics 5.9
HD 5.4

I can't seem to remember what the one at the BB scored but I thought it was higher than 5.2.

Is this right or have I not figured out how to get that Processor score better than 5.2?

 

That's what I got. RAIDing the drives got the HD score up to 5.9. When Vista was released I think 5 was the highest score. 5.9 is THE highest on the scale -> http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-vista/get/experience-index.aspx

So 5.2 is pretty good. You'll have to upgrade the processor to get higher.

 

heys guys i day 2 with the p7811 here. i can run would in conflict at native res on all high and get 14 min 30 average 45 max fps. i can run bioshock maxed but the fps never really goes above 40 and sometimes drops to 25. tried crysis demo was not playable on all high, so im going forget about that game. trying FSX now.

 

What is the advantage of RAIDing the drives? Im not very savvy but I don't glue my fingers together either. So you can RAID a stock 7811 to get higher performance or will it really make a difference?

 

You will likely not notice the difference with the RAID setup Warhammer..and it is much more tedious to do the upkeep. If you ever wanna re-install the OS, you gotta back up everything externally..it's really not worth the time, IMHO. Although, it was fun and I learned from the experience. But, still think it's a waste of time

 

fsx runs as expected , pretty good for one of the worst optimized games in history.

 

vista shows the lowest score on the index. kinda weird. they should at least average it out.

 

Gotta disagree with Mr. Viagra on this one: Vista is so big and so bloated anything you can do to make loading faster seems very worthwhile to me. The machine is snappier with RAID 0, and any big loads or saves are definitely quicker. Before I RAIDed my 7811 it could take up to 3 minutes to fully boot; now it's usable in 45 seconds, full boot usually in a minute to minute and a half.

Before making a decision Google or Wiki on RAID so you know what you're getting yourself in for but dual drive RAID 0 was one of the things I bought this machine for.

 

tallan, I completely respect any comments and input you've got. but, 3 minutes to load Vista? Bud, maybe that was before all of your updates? My machine in RAID vs Non-RAID was no noticeable difference to myself. Im sure there can be some performance gains with Raid-0, but the .6ms faster read time.. that's negligable.

E-wrecked Confidence - Stand strong

 

I agree that it didn't seem to speed up my Vista load times much, but it did speed up installs and some application starts a little. I expect this is partly to do with hard drive data cache not being enabled until after the Intel Storage Matrix driver is loaded. But HalfLife2 and Crysis still take a while to load.

Would I RAID again? Probably not. Most of the improvements I've seen come from doing a fresh install of Vista and then following several of the recomendations in the Vista Tweaks Guide.

 

Hey All,
Well, I love my new P7811. Got if fer a steal from BB and updated the drivers, installed COD4, World at War, Far Cry 2 and all the Steam stuff. Only one problem......it's locking up in the COD games when the action really picks up and I'm blasting away. I'm sure it's a heat issue because everything else works just great on the rig. Yes, I got the latest driver update from going thru the Gateway portal (what's up with that anyway?) so my drivers should be ok. I know others have had the same issue and I'm wondering if one of those laptop cooler doohickeys would help. Today, after I lock my children in their room I'm gonna try and get into some hot action on Halflife 2 Deathmatch to see if it locks up there too. Any suggestions?
One last item: Has anybody tried uninstalling DirectX10 and using DX9 instead? I heard this might improve the performance of some games.

 

Well you could make a dual boot of XP and install dx9 there and play those games on that OS. Just an Idea.

 

um if the game doesn't support DX10, it won't launch DX10....also for the games that do support DX10, you have to launch it specifically in DX10 mode.

 

Yeah, it was awful. Once I enabled the write-back cache on the RAID 0 volume I started to get the performance I was looking for; I never did mess with the settings on the single disk, so maybe that had something to do with it, plus I never bothered defragging the single disk, but definitely RAID sped Vista loads up big time on my machine. Just big files, tho, I'm not saying you'd notice much of a difference loading some e-mails or something. As a guess I'd say WoW loads 10-20% faster, most apps like Firefox no noticeable difference.

 

Just inclining the back of the machine will buy you a few degrees of cooling; somebody here was using soda bottle caps and quite happy with that solution. I have a Cyro cooler ( http://www.amazon.com/ACC-NT-CRYO-S...2?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1226266756&sr=8-2) and just putting the machine on it gets me about 5-6 degrees cooler temps, activating the fans at low another 1-2, turning the fans all the way up yet another 1-2 (centigrade all), depending on the sensor involved.

 

ok, just went out and bought a Belkin Notebook Cooler from Circuit City.
The reviews I read were pretty favorable and I really like the way it elevates the notebook about an inch off the table and inclines the back to about 3-4 inches high. It moves a ton of air and does it fairly quietly. Having encountered this problem in game before with other rigs I've owned I am certain the freezing is due to a heat dissipation issue. I know this is not very technical but, I just finished playing COD 4 in a few really busy servers for about 2 hours without so much as a stutter. I'm thinking the cooler doohickey was worth the 30 bucks.