Rock = Clevo ?

As the title says am I right to assume that Rock Direct Laptops in the UK are rebranded Clevos ?

 

Yes, they do have Clevo laptops.

 

as Eivind said,yes they are but they have been going through hard times in the last 18 months with many many complaints from owners who wish they hadnt bought.

if you are looking for a clevo i can highly recommend Kobalt Computers who are in the uk (links in sig).

 

yup one in the same.

 

They are a rebranded system, but why pay more from Rock computer when it will just turn out to be a rock like any other clevo

K-TRON

 

Well, it only weigh a couple hundred more grams than your Dell, so why don`t you sthu?

 

lol is this guy? GM didn't they go bust or something? lol

 

Before making a comment like that, you should understand a little about General Motors' History.
My avatar is "Jimmy Diesel" he was the General Motors Mascot for there hit engine design. (The two stroke Series 71 General Motors Diesel) This mascot was designed in 1938.
The Jimmy Diesel as it became called was king from its early renditions as the Series 567 by the Winton Engine Corporation of Cleveland Ohio in 1919, to the latest DDEC Silver 92 and 149 series last produced in the 1990's.
Over 335 million general Motors Diesel engines have sold since then. They are the most widely adaptable and responsive engines made. They cannot pass the emissions of today, but they are still regarded as some of the best engines manufactured in history.
On our two stroke engine group, we have discussed General Motors decision they made in 1958. In 1958 GM sold there diesel engine division over to Detroit Diesel. This was a good move at the time, as it allowed the Jimmy Diesel to be used in vehicles other than GM, (Dodge, Chevy, Ford, International, Kenworth, Peterbilt, REO, Oshkosh, Diamond)
However it ended up being a big mistake when GM engine division recreated back in the late 1970's. When they produced the fuel pincher 8.2L engine. It was a crappy engine to begin with. GM sold off there Jimmy Diesel and all of the people who worked on it to Detroit Diesel. Now with fresh employees, they came up with a great design, which ended up being an unreliable junky engine. Later GM topped that with the 6.5L GM Diesel, which has a really bad track record. We have discussed that if GM never sold there concept to Detroit Diesel, GM would be the furthest ahead in sales, revenue, and so forth. There company was the backbone of the Unites States for a long period of time, producing everything from power generation stations, to plane, submarine and automobile engines.
The General Motors 6.5L diesel engine is so bad, that the United States Army/Marine Corps had to get permission from the Federal Government to open their "Jimmy Diesel" engine plant in Kansas and Ohio, both of which were closed for over 30 years, to start producing engines for the Military M113A3 vehicles. General Motors has a rich history, one which trumps any other engine/car manufacturer.
There are some great books out there on this, General Motors was the reason the United States won World War II.

Get the facts right before making a comment like that. Jimmy Diesel was a very known and respected figure, sadly his mark on history is being lost.
I recreated my avatar from a 1938 print, for the American Truck Historical Society.

And yes my stance on Clevo is pretty clear. They are junk. After having a Clevo D900K, I will never buy a Clevo, I will never recommend a Clevo, and I will never speak anything good about them. You are buying a rock, a piece of junk, whenever you buy a Clevo.

K-TRON

 

I was going to buy from Rock but I changed my mind after reading through their recent forums.

 

id hate to think what you would call alienware/dellienware then.
everyone has his own opinion. how old was your D900k and where did you buy it from as not all OEM's are the same. quite a few are dedicated and customer friendly and will bend over backward to help you out and thats in the uk and usa.
imo after owning quite a few computers in my time clevo has been 100% the best so far by a long shot.

 

I bought it from Voodoo, probably the slyest group of criminals I have ever come across. I bought replacement parts from RJTECH and Z-TRONICS, both dodgy enterprises within there own.
5 dead motherboard, a dead graphics card, killed 4 memory cards, and the list goes on. All because of faulty design. The system would literally work for 3 hours before it would die again. Of course Voodoo didnt give a damn after they received there money. Their warranty covers nothing. I vouch to never buy one again. It was the poorest designed system I ever bought. Best part was I got convinced to buy it from reading here. What a mistake that was, after being here as long as I have, I dont take more than 5% of what I read here as true.

K-TRON

 

thats sad to hear. if it wasnt for this forum i would not of found kobalt.
there are quite a few companys out there that once they get your money they dont give a dalm. kobalt will bend over backwards to help its customers out and when you phone up you speak to the managing director or technical director and feel like your talking to a friend instead of a technical helpdesk.
in my honest opinion i wont buy anything else except clevo/kobalt laptops from now on.

 

we are way off topic but I can't help but respond:

I know enough about GM's history, here is my summary

GM: American company that flooded the market with a lot of terrible cars that handle like barge boats, had one decent innovation called Onstar, but then went bust.

Cheers,
Neil.

 

Would you mind detailing the design flaws for an ignorant reader that is considering a Clevo?
I see you have a dell. Are you suggesting it has a better design? Can you detail your thinking that lead to buying a dell?

I thank you for taking the time to educate Anon.
Edit. Also a diesel fan.

 

I can tell you the problems,
1) The D900K had a very unstable BIOS, which would randomly decide whether or not it wanted to even boot. I would say a good 10% of the time I tried booting my laptop, it would not power up. I would have to remove the battery and ac power adaptor, discharge, and try powering up.
2) The bios was instable, which is a software coding issue on Clevo's part
3) The system would randomly choose not to recognize the harddrives, keyboard or touchpad. This was not motherboard specific, this happened on four of the five replacement motherboards I had
4) The onboard USB ports were not properly grounded, if you plugged in a USB device the system would instantly hang and freezeup. This happened on all of the 5 D900K motherboards I had.
5) The motherboard has an onboard cahce controller for the harddrives, which is often problematic, and results in random hang ups.

My dell has had none of these problems. It has a solid motherboard, a Bios which works, and a power circuit which doesnt give random crap to me when I use my laptop
What my big problem was, was that before purchase I read up all of the wonderful review here on the D900K, and none of them mentioned any of these problems. A friend of mine wrote a review here, I will leave him unnamed, but his D900K was a complete piece of work just like mine, even though he never stated any of the flaws in his review.
So take what you read in these reviews with a big grain of salt. I regret even reading the reviews here because they are all flawed and biased.

If you still consider buying a clevo, buy it, if it has any problem return it and never deal with clevo again.

Because of my Clevo I will never buy another laptop again. I do not trust these laptop manufacturers as they always cut corners and screw over the end user.
Dell in my opinion has the best warranty out there. I bought the dell complete care package, and when something breaks, its replaced and covered within 3 days. Great service, and a great product. Just do your research, cause not every laptop is created the same.
I bought the E1505 cause it was a very solid laptop, it was perfected, and proven reliable, thus I bought it. I did not buy my E1505 based on reviews I read, I based it on dismantling a friends unit and inspecting the parts.

If I ever did that with the D900K, I would have never bought it, cause its a complete piece of junk

K-TRON

 

i can totally understand your anger after reading you above post K-TRON but you cant blame clevo for this. clevos are re badged and sold by quite a lot of resellers around the world. yes,there are some dodgy ones after reading posts on here about some companys but there are also some very good ones,ie sager,xoticpc,powernotebooks,kobalt who look after their customers. over a year ago i would have added alienware to that list but now i wouldnt recommend them to my worst enemy.

 

Some guys just have all the bad luck when it comes to laptops...

I can go to every forum in here and find dozens of horror stories but there are still people in post all around them singing praises to there new best laptop ever.

I have no doubt there are people with issues out there and all I can do is offer my condolences and wish them luck on there next purchase.

Sorry to hear about you luck with Clevo K-Tron...

 

I am kind of disappointed with your response.
I will grant that you are doing some random person on the internet a favor, but you said there are design issues. I asked about design issues. And most all of this is not design issues. I am really more interested in what you see as design issues, from your first hand experience.

Now the Bios issues are a pain. One reason I loved Asus for many years is they would release Bios updates even years after the motherboard was done, just to help there customers. I have a concern that I have to get new Bios files from my reseller, and cannot get them from the manufacturer. I have to download them from a user here. That's silly.

So can you detail the differences between the Dell and the Clevo when you disassembled them? Can you point out the design flaws and strengths of them?

Again, I appreciate your feedback. Thank you very much.

 

Still hoping to get an answer

 

Hes a half-wit. Dont bother.

 

like any piece of electrical equipment you will get some bad ones but on the whole and just by looking at the horror storys from alienware compared to clevo there is no comparison.

 

I should also note that what I think is one of the problems that K-Tron had with his D900K, and why he is so mad about it, is that he spent a lot of money trying to customize the thing ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=224877). I don't think the paint he added did anything, but when he started trying to wire in extra LEDs and such to the USB hub, I think he may have gone beyond the design tolerances.

 

sorry, I didnt see the post

The design, well its upside down.
If you have ever opened the D900T or D900K, you will see that the motherboard is mounted not on the bottom of the chassis, but on the top.
Why?
Clevo Insists it results in lower temperatures

Does it?
I dont think so, it results in an unpleasant experience.
The palmrest heats up excessively, and the bottom of the laptop stays cool. Taking it apart you will find see that the chipset heatsink is poorly designed, as its just a passive metal plate which is connected to the palmrest, to make your palms even more sweaty form using it.

Its a terribly designed system, has terrible Motherboards, and a really flaky BIOS.

My mods did not do result in any negative implications on this product.
The USB hub doesnt power the lights, the backlight inverter does.

I think I know my laptop better than you guys do, so dont make stupid assumptions.

K-TRON

 

I seem to remember you saying something about tying something into the USB hub, but that might have been on a different subject. It has been some time. I'm also not sure that having the motherboard mounted on the top of the chassis is that unusual, unless I'm misinterpreting what you're saying with that, as I'm pretty sure I've seen several other manufacturers doing the same thing (Gateway, Asus). In fact, thinking it over, you'd almost have to do it that way if you go with the bottom fan intake and rear/side vent, unless you maybe tried mounting it mid-level to the fan, or had additional size increasing gaps for air-flow...

As well, it is quite possible that even if the D900K/T design was faulty, that does not automatically hold that all other Clevo designs are poorly designed. Extrapolating a single design into a condemnation of an entire company would be like saying, to borrow from your own history lesson, that GM and Jimmy Diesel sucks just because the fuel pincher 8.2L engine did.

I don't think I made any stupid assumptions (this time), but it wouldn't be the first time I have.

 

pitching in with bad luck

my g1sn was still overheating after the 3rd rma

turned out to be dodgy after dodgy 8600m. (remember the nvidia fiasco with the faulty gpus... yeah)

now with the clevo im plaged by this crackling/powermizer nightmare since the day i got it a few months ago... the more i read about it the more i come to the conclusion that its gpu bios/nvidias screwup... AGAIN

my a8jp with the ati card has been thru living HELL.. you have no idea.. almost 20hrs/day worth of full blast gaming between 3 people for 2 yrs streight and all it needed was some compressed air once every blue moon... still running strong after 4 or so years, even tho the chassis is about to literally, and i mean literally split in 2

 

If you mounted the motherboard to the bottom of the chassis, how would you get the battery out?

How does the dell mount the MB?

Would you be so kind as post a Picture of dells 'Not Upside down' motherboard mounting? If I am imposing I retract the request.

I ask as I have only taken appart one laptop and it is mounted directly under the keyboard.