After unboxing NP8662, What should I do first?

Hi,

I usually build my own gaming desktops, so I'm not familiar with these gaming laptops. As I stated in a previous post, I just ordered a NP8662, and am wondering what to do when I first get this thing up and running.

What should I do after I unbox? OS and drivers will all be installed, I have read some things about Intel Storage Matrix? Should I install that? Anything else I should install at first? (besides windows updates)

Are there any laptop coolers that anyone recommends?

Or am I good to go for some extreme gaming without installing anything?

Thank you

 

NC2000/1000 are strongly recommend for gaming laptop.

 

Congrats on the order.

When you get the system, you want to do some temp monitoring of the devices while you test it out with benchmarks:
- 3DMark06 and/or Vantage (for the videocard)
- wPrime (for the CPU)
- HDtune (for the HDD)

if the benchmarks come out good, and the temp remain good as well... then you are fine.

but its always good to check for the latest drivers, such as the Intel Matrix Storage Driver... which seems to help for minimizing HDD temps.

as for notebook coolers, check out the:
Notebook Coolers : A Buyers Guide

and for temp monitoring:
Monitoring Notebook Temps: nVidia & ATI, CPU, HDD

 

Some of the first things I do are to check temperatures of the CPU and GPU, update to the most recent GPU drivers, run stress / burn in tests for a few hours such as Orthos Stress Test while monitoring all temperatures including the Hard Disk drive.

I usually remove any recovery partitions and reclaim the space. After I am satisfied that everything is working and nothing is getting too hot, I then do a full system snapshot that will allow me to restore the system back to its initial install state if I ever needed to in the future.

 

Hi,

Thank you all for the prompt responses. Especially you Gophn for your very very detailed response I am going to install all of those programs listed above, and do what was suggested. It's funny because the NC2000 is the cooler that I was already looking at on newegg

About updated video card drivers, I dont think nvidia has released anything for the 260 and 280m cards yet, but I could be wrong...

Thanks again everyone !

 

the 260M and 280M are still new cards, so new drivers should be out shortly.

 

Sit back, relax, get a beer (or two), and bask in the glow of accomplishment - you've arrived, my friend, you've arrived!

 

drink the beer, but keep it far away from the laptop...we dont want any accidents now do we

 

Exactly! That's why you need to sit back, first, although perhaps I should have said to sit way, way back, away from the computer (so you can admire it in its entirety).

 

also, do not get drunk and pass out. this is bad.

(you will most likely spill your beer)

 

Are you talking about setting a restore point in Microsoft System Restore, or something else?

 

I was not referring to System Restore, I was referring to a tiny backup program called Drive Snapshot. Acronis True Image is another one that I would only recommend if some one found Drive Snapshot too involved to use.

Drive Snapshot is a stand alone program, does not require an installation and has a fully functional 30 day demo. However, you need to create your own method of bootable CD such as Bart PE or UBCD but Acronis does all of that for you.

I am not sure about System Restore because I like to keep all background processes to the absolute minimum due to gaming performance.

 

Wow, that would have been great to know/use before my desktop ate itself last week!! I will have to look into that Acronis one for my laptop!! Thanks LaptopNut!

 

Acronis is easier to use but it needs to be installed, runs its own services in the background and the GUI is much more than it needs to be. Drive Snapshot takes more effort and knowledge to set up, but once you have done this, you will find it is more flexible and it is a lot cleaner on the resources.

I have used both from bootable Bart PE and UBCD CD's and I have done backups and restores hundreds of times with no problems. I have also done backups while windows was running and restored these with no problems also.

 

actually, you don't need to install acronis at all. The cd is bootable so you can just make a partition image onto a backup drive or something. really simple stuff. I rate acronis 9/10 i think people give it a bad rap sometimes. Also it lets you dynamically change partition sizes of images, do compressed backups, etc.

 

If you want to manipulate any Acronis Images while windows is running for convenience sake then you need to install it. You might just want to open a stored image to get some files and even to do that, you need to have Acronis already installed.

Some people may also wish to create images of drives from within windows.

With Drive Snapshot regardless of whether you use a bootable CD or not, you never need to install anything no matter what you want to do.

Acronis has gotten a bad rep sometimes most likely due to its bootable CD and unnecessarily bloated GUI. That CD uses a Linux kernel and if the particular distribution they are using doesn't like some of your hardware, you could find that the CD won't boot up or will freeze. This has happened to many although Acronis Support are really good and will solve any issues as soon as they can.

You can also use Acronis with Bart PE which will have much better overall compatibility since it is using a subset of Windows XP or Vista.

 

acronis can create a clone so it's an exact copy of your drive, fully able to be manipulated and even booted from