Xmeld? (MSI Turion notebooks)

Anyone buy from Xmeld before? They have two MSI Turion notebooks I'm interested in:

http://www.xmeld.com/html/msi1013.html
http://www.xmeld.com/html/msi1029.html

They sent a surprisingly fast and detailed reply to the questions I emailed them:

Their MSI-1013 webpages says that the Bluetooth/802.11g combo card doesn't do both Bluetooth and WiFi at the same time, so I'm inclined to go find a nice Atheros miniPCI card and use an external Bluetooth USB radio. It looks like the 12" notebooks are in stock, but I'd really like that X700 GPU in the 15.4" notebook... hmm. Anyhow, can anyone vouch for these guys?

 

They have good resellerratings, but there's only seven reviews. The 1029 looks way cool especially with the MT.

 

http://www.resellerratings.com/seller7185.html

That's reassuring, thanks.

 

They are great to deal with.

 

fortunately/unfortunately, they're one of the very few MSI resellers out there at the moment, so you'll be hard pressed to find an alternative i'm afraid. But so far responses from those who dealt with them have been positive, as well as the MSI notebooks themselves!

 

i bought MSI 1013 recently from them. The only thing i can tell you is that you better call them amd make sure that they have everything in stock otherwise u can wait for weeks.
Talking about the laptop itself, I'm about to change it to a centrino version, MSI S260/1012. It has being a total ATI for Linux disaster. Sound doesn't work under linux, I filed a bug report with ALSA project. but who knows if it will be ever fixed. I spent days configuring screen resolution, still could get native 1280x800. The best I've achieved with ATI propritary drivers is 1280x768, which looks kinda wierd. Basically ATI once again doesn't give a fck about Linux users. So i'm thinking to send it back and get MSI 1012 back from them with a nice Linux friendly centrino chipset. To give u an idea of ATIs linux support here is my lspci|grep ati
$ lspci|grep -i ati
00:00.0 Host bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5950
00:01.0 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5a3f
00:13.0 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4374
00:13.1 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4375
00:13.2 USB Controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4373
00:14.0 SMBus: ATI Technologies Inc ATI SMBus (rev 10)
00:14.1 IDE interface: ATI Technologies Inc Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller ATI
00:14.3 ISA bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4377
00:14.4 PCI bridge: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4371
00:14.5 Multimedia audio controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4370 (rev 01)
00:14.6 Modem: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 4378 (rev 01)
00:18.0 Host bridge: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] K8 [Athlon64/Opteron] HyperTransport Technology Configuration
01:05.0 VGA compatible controller: ATI Technologies Inc: Unknown device 5955

:centrino:

 

Thanks for this personal experience that sure will help those who want to use it under Linux.

By the way, does it matter to use different distros of Linux to get around the above issues!? Which Linux do you use?

 

The MSI MS-1029 Turion 64 MT(25w) + 128MB ATI X700 notebook is going mainstream!

http://www.cyberpowersystem.com/highendsystem/ntbkx649700.asp?v=d

 

if you want a msi 1029 or a msi 1013

goto laptoplogic.com here is the thread.. http://www.laptoplogic.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1126

become a member and give him an email he can give you a quote of what you want installed in the computer. His forum name is Fords8 he is a reputable person and has sold many to other people in the forums. His prices are lower than xmeld's im sure of that. His systems that he had sold so far none of them had a dead pixel.

He accepts money orders, credit cards and paypal and possibly other forms of payments.

 

I would strongly advise against buying the s260 for use with Linux! I've written a short report on my eh... "adventure" with installing Linux on it here: msi s260

It may be that you will get it to work properly with the new bios, but I doubt it.

Good luck anyway..... :noisyfan:

 

Hi guyz.

I called them last week (tusday) for a 1013 MSI laptop. They told me they have everything in stock, 4 day building, 2-3 day shipping. If I order it now, ill get it thurday or friday the weeks after.

Now we are the Friday of the next week and I still dont have any news. On the web it's saying :
Order Status: Building

Making more than 7 Bussiness days and still building the worst is that I called them Wed, Thur, Frid and i'm always hitting an anwsering machine. I always left a message and I've never been called back ...

I hope their web site is bugged and my laptop is on the way ...

 

Did you try the latest distro of Ubuntu? I find it strange why a notebook using the standard Centrino-Sonoma platform should have more problems with Linux than a notebook using AMD Turion (S270).