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I've bought this baby as a replacement for my Dell Vostro 3300 (returned after 2 weeks because of the uncomfortable heat on the palm rest area), and after playing with it for a week, here's a mini review.
My configuration Core i5-540M, NVidia G310M CUDA (optimus), 4 Gb RAM DDR3 1066, 500 GB HDD running on 5400 rpm.
Build quality Not as exceptional as higher end brands, but I'm generally satisfied with the build quality. Quite sturdy & durable. Some details to point out:
- I like the chassis design. If you see the bottom part of the notebook, you can easily open 2 plastic covers. One is for accessing the HDD, and the other one is for CPU, GPU, and RAM. This means that you can easily clean your heatsink & fan (and even replace your thermal paste for you experts out there) without opening the whole chassis.
- As what the German users stated, I also found that some outer sides of the keyboard pad area are slightly raised, but this is not a big deal for me. On the positive side, typing is great on this notebook (but this is subjective, I know).
- The location of the CTRL & Fn buttons on the keyboard is now.. well.. CTRL then Fn, just like any other notebooks (On the ThinkPads they're Fn then CTRL)
- The speakers are somehow good enough for a notebook speaker, they beat my expectations!
- The LCD cover is the glossy type, so it's not for you who don't like glossy stuffs. And yes it attracts fingerprints =)
- The LCD itself is also the glossy type. Nothing exceptional about the LCD, but just nice.
- I like the fact that the top area between the LCD & the battery (the buttons & speakers area) is quite sturdy and only flex a little bit when pressed. (For comparison, Asus U45Jc and Vostro 3300 flex more)
- It's still new so I cannot comment on the durability of the LCD hinges.
Temperature & Heat In my opinion, this notebook has a good thermal management (well at least compared to my Vostro 3300). Just get slightly warm, never too hot. And this is without aircon, on a tropical country. After one hour idling & doing light tasks, the temps are as follow (measured using HWmonitor) *edited:
- Ambience temp: 27-29 C (no aircon)
- CPU core 1: Around 42 C
- CPU core 2: Around 43 C
- GPU core: Around 47 C
Please note that those figures are "approximately". I simply don't remember the exact temperatures.
Others - The D drive size is small so I re-size the partitions. Made the C smaller and make the D bigger. I didn't touch the recovery partition. But I haven't checked the recovery feature so I don't know whether I spoiled the recovery feature or not =p
- There's quite some bloatwares there.. you might want to un-install them.
- Design-wise, it's quite basic.. Don't expect designer-quality design such as Asus NX90.
Well that's all, I hope this is useful for those of you who are considering this notebook. I'll try to do a detailed performance & temperature review, but can't promise anything for now.
I've seen some conflicting information - can you help out by confirming if the laptop has an Alps or Synaptics touchpad? Also is the ethernet only 100mbit?
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
