Sager Longevity and Tips for Buying in Canada

I'm strongly considering buying a Sager soon, but I haven't heard much about them. I thought I'd register here and ask the knowledgeable people of NBR if they could tell me a little about these notebooks' longevity and reliability.

Also, if anyone has tips to save a bit of money for getting it shipped to Canada, that would be greatly appreciated.

 

Longevity depends on the following:
1.) if you treat the machine right, it will treat you right for many years
2.) if you don't insist on playing all the latest games on max settings for years, then it will last long in terms of playing future games 3+ years on medium-high, close to max settings
3.) for daily usage, net browsing, watching movies, pumping music, that kind of stuff....will last 5+ years (battery life is debatable, as in all laptops)

Build quality:
1.) build quality is good, even better than most OEM brands (Toshiba, Acer, Dell, Lenovo). Versus Asus and MSI, they are on equal grounds (some say Asus and MSI are superior).
2.) now that we are having matte bezels on the screens, its even better. Scratch resistant, awesome.
3.) solid frame, very durable

Ease of maintenance:
1.) easy access to vital components (cleaning dust is easy, pop open the back plate and there we go)
2.) upgrading parts yourself is a breeze, as long as its not upgrading to a new line of GPUs. That one's a nightmare.

Anything else i can help with?

 

Most laptops will endure the test of time as long as users don't neglect them. Clevo's build quality is good and we've had customers tell us how much their expectations were met and exceeded after x amount of years of use without a hiccup.

For purchases made within Canada from a reseller in the states, I recommend upgrading your shipping. When we ship via FedEx Priority, they cover the customs brokerage fee, expedite the delivery time, and it's not a drastic difference in shipping charge. You're still subjected to Canada taxation though, which I hear is pretty heavy.

 

Thanks for that detailed post b0b1man. As you mentioned and as I've seen elsewhere, Sagers are easy to expand on/maintain, which is good since I don't mind getting my hands dirty.

And I'm currently considering buying it from a Canadian reseller, so eurocom or reflexnotebooks. I think that'll save me quite a bit of money as opposed to purchasing from the States. Don't really know where to look for MSI though

 

Always good to see a fellow Canadian:]. Just wanted to chime in re: where to order from. I know Reflexnotebooks are based in Montreal, but eventually they are importing too, so they have the brokerage fee included in the component prices. Most of the US-based resellers include the brokerage fee with shipping, you have to pay the tax (13% HST in my case). I ordered the w230st, and with similar config reflexnotebook actually came out to be more costly. So I went with Mythlogic, they are pretty reputed and had the customization options to my liking (4702MQ CPU etc.). Pick a reseller based on your liking/reviews/component preferences etc, doesn't really matter if they are based on US or not, you will end up paying the same amount in total.

P.S: NCIX.com and newegg.ca both carry MSI, all the latest models.

 

Be cautious about EUROCOM. There are people on the forum who have experienced nightmares when dealing with them.

 

For reliability, I think the biggest issue with notebook is how they are transported. I see some people put them in a bag that is nice and padded, but then they throw the bag in the car. Personally I am super careful, I even have the hard drive spin down before transporting. So far my two notebooks haven't failed. Which is the problem, it is harder to justify a replacement when the old one works fine. Of course batteries only last about three years, so those have been replaced.

 

Taking care of your notebook helps a lot but things can just happen. One day at work I was doing my thing then out of no where my computer just turned off. After I took it apart I found the video card had fried out. I think this has the same chance of happening on any brand. That computer was not a Sager just for the record. Moral of the story, you never know what could go bad or when.

 

Thanks for that. Yeah I've noticed Reflex is a little more expensive than others sometimes. I'll see what Mythlogic has to offer, but I'm leaning towards Eurocom now...

Really? I live near their showroom and they offer 10% discounts to students, so I don't have to worry about shipping (I can go pick it up myself) and their prices with the 10% discount make it very difficult to find better prices elsewhere for similar builds tbh.

And yeah I agree with the rest of you RE: taking care of the laptop. I've had a pretty low-end laptop for 4 years now, and the only issue with it is battery life, but I've seen instances where others have more expensive ones that barely last; sometimes you're just lucky.

 

I don't like bashing on anything (except when its about fun stuff and nothing serious meant by it).

BUT. I will allow myself to say this about Eurocom: people have had bad experiences with their customer service. Beyond bad actually. Its quite scary to read about those cases (and there are many walls of text which tell these stories in the forums here and elsewhere).

Their prices are slim, you say. Thats good! But if ever sometime you need to take advantage of their warranty service, you might run into some of the difficulties the other guys had when they did that.
The thing with these "high performance" laptops is....they are a big investment, you will want this thing to last and to perform flawlessly (thats what we all paid for).
If something comes up, Eurocom is NOT known for politely taking care of things. They even went as far as threatening and accusing their own customers.

By the reviews of the other America-based resellers here, Mythlogic and XoticPC are known for professionalism and friendliness, with a whole lot of customization options for their machines.
Mythlogic even has its own standarts of preparing custom configurations, where they test all the machine's functionality, stability and they send it with everything tuned up for maximum performance.
They even install their own customized BIOS on it (which I think is really cool from them).

Its entirely your decision man, I hope Eurocom has changed its attitude towards customers and maybe you could be lucky enough with them to get both a cheaper and equally functional machine from them.
As I said earlier, I have NOT dealt with Eurocom (but I was thnking of dealing with them years ago). The awful reviews stopped me from doing so.
Anyhow, tell us about your experience no matter which reseller you chose!

 

That's a HUGE bonus, if that's the case I'd say read the reviews a little bit, if you think you can deal with poor customer service (i.e. yell at their face since you live close to them), go for it. Not paying for shipping, just walking into their showroom if something is wrong and talk to a real person is a huge bonus IMO.

 

I do love the fact that it only takes me 15 minutes to repaste my cpu and gpu in my NP8170. As mentioned above, it's very easy to self upgrade as well. Current battery is lasting over two years, with little performance change. That being said, I do baby this thing.

 

i emailed eurocom about that 10% student discount since i live in ottawa, lets see what happens.

 

this may be a little late now but I ended up buying a Clevo P177SM from Eurocom a few weeks ago and I got it last week. I've yet to come into any major issues and their service was more than adequate. I'm very pleased, especially with their 10% discount.

 

Just a suggestion, you may want to consider buying extended warranty if your reseller offers it.