Expecting the NP8268s, need a little hand holding

I am awaiting delivery of my new np8268s, and this would be my first foray into gaming laptops. Coming from a desktop experience immediately prior, and i would like to hear about how owners of this laptop went about setting up their units.

To be precise, i would like to hear about the checks, tweaks and installs that your sager went through before you guys actually put the beast to work (short of overclocking, that is - i'm not planning to do that anytime soon).

Like what programs did you install to ensure laptop longevity?
Or what aftermarket products did you added on to optimize your machine?

My sager will run on Win7 Home Premium.

 

hi
did you order with operating system installed. if so it will be ready to go out of the box.
if not post back and members can advise further on setting it up.

everything you need to monitor and benchmark can be found in my signature below.

 

Just be aware with home premium you won't ever be able to use the full 32G of memory the beasty can have. You'll max out at 16G because of operating system limitations.

Which frankly shouldn't be an issue as 16G seems to be more than sufficient for most people's needs.

I'd say make sure to do the standard windows foray into deployment.

I have the 8258-S, the flashier sister to your system, and this is what I did:

1. I had to install my own bluetooth drivers (they didn't come installed)
2. I had to update the Intel AC wifi drivers to the 17.x version. The previous 13.x version... sucked. And it behaved erratically until the driver fix.
3. Using NVIDIA Experience, update all the drivers to the latest. For the 800 series card, it gives better performance and better cooling overall.
4. Spend a few hours playing with the keyboard color options (cough)
5. Brag to the wife about the colorized keyboard.
6. Watch as wife demands a laptop the same as you.
7. Go to Xotic and order a laptop for the wife, who is currently glaring at you.
8. Go back to playing with the keyboard color options (cough)
9. Finally get serious and install an antivirus suite (avoid mcafee and norton as both are absolute pigs). I picked AVG free which is 'average'.
10. Pick an antispyware suite as well to cover what the antivirus won't catch. I picked malwarebytes and spybot search & destroy 1.6 (for the teatime resident locker)
11. Start to slap those games on your system, sit back, enjoy a cool one for the next... long while...
12. Enjoy the rig.

I also got a laptop cooler to keep the laptop even cooler than it normally is.

Do you need a laptop cooler? No, you really don't. It keeps things significantly cool regardless.

Do you want a laptop cooler? Your choice. I'd say yes though as a cooler laptop, regardless of how well the laptop itself cools, means a longer life laptop.

Without the laptop cooler, I had average CPU temperatures in the low to mid 70's, and the GPU's in the high 70's to low 80's under heavy load.

With the laptop cooler, my CPU generally hovers in the mid to upper 60's, and the GPU hardly ever approaches over 76c.

So it makes significant cooling to a laptop that already has significant cooling.

Enjoy the rig!

After 6 months, mine's been behaving like a champ.

Oh! One final piece of advise. Every 4-8 months (depending if you have pets, excess dust, etc), take the 4 fans out from the bottom where your fans are located, hold the fan fins down and blow them out with air, and the same for the vent.

Then get a lint free static free rag, and wipe down the heatsinks to remove any buildup of dust on them.

This will keep your system always at the maximum cooling.

Some people also say you will need to repaste the GPU and CPU with thermal paste every so often. I think it's depending on the thermal paste used, and how you use your rig.

Some people swear by repasting every 6 months, others swear they never have to do it for the entire ownership of the laptop.

I've never seen a definitive 'this is what you must do'. So it's probably a person by person and laptop by laptop basis.

I guess keep an eye on your thermals. Run something like open hardware monitor or HWMonitor. If you notice yoru GPU and CPU idling much higher thermals than you started out with, and there is confirmed to have no load on either, then it's likely time to re-paste your system.

That's probably the best measure.

Otherwise, enjoy!

 

I'm dead with the "wife wants a laptop same as you" part because I can completely imagine it XD XD XD

 

Not much else to add to what Ashen-Shugar suggest, thanks for writing that all up!
I do prefer Avast! over AVG, but either are good freeware antivirus programs.

Did you get the OS preinstalled or do you plan on doing it yourself?

 

Great advices so far! :thumbsup:

To ashen shugar: i do believe you've given me a lot of nice input here in the forum, i'd like to give you a "rep" (if that is possible). How does one do that anyway?

About item # 5 on your list, i will have to say i am way ahead of you pal! I think that's the single most important thing to do that will ensure "laptop longevity". :laugh:

 

About the OS, it will come pre-installed i think. Not really sure since i'm ordering the unit through a friend. So either the company or he will be doing that.

No worries here about that 16GB RAM cap, at any rate i can always upgrade to Win 8.1 when the need arises (which i believe is waaay in the future still, like, 3-4 years maybe?)

 

I still have 16GB and Windows 7 on a desktop and it hasn't seen any need for upgrade. You can always do so when its time.

 

By then you probably would want Windows 9. Also, as a side note, NEVER do a Windows 7 --> 8 upgrade cycle. Never. It severely hinders the boot and program launching time of windows 8. I've done it before and used it for months thinking 8 was a lot faster than 7, until I manually installed windows 8 on its own and just... HNGGG. SPEED. I could hit "restart" from within windows on my Plextor and it'd close my programs, reboot, let me open teamspeak and be back chatting with my friends in 39 seconds.

 

Well that certainly is news to me. I'll keep that in mind. In my work we have several lappies with Win 8.1, it does take a lot of getting used to transiting to "charms" and "corners".

I'll keep my fingers crossed that software will still support Win 7 in that 3-4 years.

 

Charms? Corners? Install Stardock Start 8 and disable charms and corners entirely while adding a start menu back AND boot-to-desktop mode (in case it doesn't work in windows for some reason). You could use StartIsBack if you don't wanna buy start 8, but I have never personally used it and thus I cannot comment on its effectiveness firsthand.

Edit: I remember this one time I had a problem I had to deal with in Windows 8 and a MS tech was remote controlling my PC and she couldn't figure out why there was a start menu and why there was no metro screen. Even though RIGHT on the start menu had a "windows 8 menu" button. And even then she just wanted to get to my control panel. Which was a link on the Start 8 menu too, but because it wasn't what she was used to she couldn't fathom it XD.

 

Like I stated a while back, as long as you don't use a custom vBios, your temps should be fine. However, I'd like to point out there are some bothersome throttling issues.