My Sager NP7250 Mini-Review

Hello. I recently bought a Sager NP7250 and during my OCD research of it before making my decision, I noticed a serious lack of feedback from anyone that owns this laptop. I thought I'd help fill the void by writing this mini-review. After the specs I'll start with the pros, then the cons, then any other random stuff I feel is worth mentioning.

Sager NP7250
Black Onyx
12.1" WXGA (1280x800)
1.73GHz Intel® Celeron® M processor 430 w/1,024k L2 On-die Cache
SiS M671 Integrated Video w/Up to 256MB Dynamic Video Memory
512MB (1 SODIMM) DDR2/667 Memory (Later upgraded to 1GB)
80GB SATA/150 Hard Drive at 5,400 RPM
Combo 8x8x6x4x Dual Layer DVD +/-R/RW 5x DVD-RAM 24x CD-R/RW Drive
4-in-1 Memory Card Reader (MS/MSPRO/SD/MMC)
Built-in 802.11B+G Wireless LAN Card
4-cell Smart Li-ion Battery
Windows XP Home (I paid and extra ten dollars to get XP instead of Vista)
Price after shipping: $769.00

I bought the notebook from powernotebooks.com. They were great to deal with and I would gladly buy from them again.

Pros:

The first thing I noticed was the "piano paint" finish. Very shiny and pretty and all that. Check it.




The screen has good view angles and doesn't flex much. I have to push pretty hard to get any ripples to appear on the screen. The hinge is pretty stiff and doesn't wobble. I noticed that the screen was less reflective than my mom's Toshiba M115 and my dad's HP dv2000.

The first thing I did after booting it up was to remove all the crap that comes pre-installed. I was happy to see that only two things needed to be removed. One was a 30 day trial of Nero Essentials, the other was something called PowerDVD. I actually don't think PowerDVD was a trial, but I removed it anyway. The Windows installation is the best I've ever seen. Granted, I haven't seen that many, but it's way faster than both my desktop with a 2Ghz processor and my mom's laptop with a Core Duo.

The touchpad has a nice texture to it. The keyboard is easy to type. I don't notice any flex and the keys are nice and firm. Next to the power button are three other buttons. One for the internet, one for mail, and one for "quiet mode". There isn't much in the manual on quiet mode. It turns the fan down and I assume it turns the CPU down as well. I don't use it much.

The laptop is quite small and light. It's very easy to carry around at school.

The laptop came with a lame microfiber glove and a less lame square microfiber cloth. Needless to say, I use the square cloth.




Cons:

The laptop gets pretty warm on the left side, but it's not like I was ever going to have kids anyway. It would probably run cooler if I had gone with a Core 2 Duo processor, but $195 cooler? Probably not. The heat makes the fan run constantly, but it's not very loud. Even in a quiet room, it's not loud enough to be annoying.

The screen could be a little brighter. On it's brightest setting, it's bright enough to be seen in sunlight, but it would be nice if it could get a little brighter. When comparing it to my parents' laptops, the screen is brighter than my mom's Toshiba Satellite M115, but not as bright as my dad's HP dv2000. I tried to take a picture that showed the difference, but I failed.

By far the worst part of the laptop is the battery. I only get about an hour and twenty minutes with wifi on surfing the internet. It's only a four cell battery so I suppose it doesn't get much better. The battery is light and I wouldn't mind carrying a second battery if it didn't cost an extra hundred dollars. Here's a picture showing how small the battery is. I don't know why my hand's so red...



Random stuff:

Don't bother trying to install linux on this. There aren't any drivers for the M671. Everything else worked, but what's the point when you have to run it at 800X600?

The cd that came with it with the drivers and manual on it was for Vista instead of XP. It was also for a completely different computer... You can download the correct drivers and manual off of their site though.

This picture was hard to get, but I think it shows how cool the power button is.

 

Nice run-down! There's not a whole lot of info about the NP7250 and you are only the second person I have seen post anything about it.

I suspected that the battery life would be poor on this machine- it has low capacity and is powering some power-hungry components.

Would it be too much trouble to post some pictures?
If you're interested in writing a full review for us you can get paid:
http://www.notebookreview.com/writeReview/

 

I won't have access to our digital camera till Wednesday. I'll get some pictures up as soon as I can after that and then I'll edit my original post again.

 

I updated the original post with some pictures and a little bit of text about the screen. If anybody has any questions or wants pictures of specific parts of the laptop, I'll do my best to accommodate you.

 

Can you submit your final review to Andrew or Chaz,
... its would show a nice new Clevo ultraportable available for people that are looking for one.

Nice work BTW.

 

I don't really think I'm a good enough writer to do a full review, but I'll give it a shot. I'll wait a week or so so I can get more familiar with it.

 

Awesome.

Theres always a first time for everything.

You can look at the review template and ask questions from Chaz or Andrew.

 

I know this is not a linux forum, but I was wondering about the comment:

Couldn't you use something like ndiswrapper to install the windows driver of the M671?

This looks like a great small laptop, but it would be far less desirable if linux was impossible to install.