Say something bad about Sager

I have had an lcd screen on my np8310 give out after 2 weeks of owning it and started getting stuck pixels, than decided to return it. To balance things out though aside from the crap screen I really enjoyed the laptop. I'll also have to add that the laptop was somewhat noisy (most likely most sagers are).

 

Well my P170HM is being replaced as we speak due to a GPU card that went dead after 3 weeks. That can be just a fluke or a lemon. I don't hold any grudge against Clevo/Sager and my reseller has been nothing but amazing taking care of me.

From the little time I had it here's what I would like to have or improve in a laptop of this price. Again these are not deal breakers:

1- Switchable graphics
2- Backlit keyboard
3- Proper numpad on the 17"
4- Better sound quality (Yes even with fn +5 and THX)

 

Off topic, but which reseller did you purchase through? Assuming Canadian?

My brother and I are both in the market for mid/high performance laptops currently, with the Clevo/Sager being right up there. Would prefer a Canadian reseller for support (like Reflex Notebooks).

 

If you absolutely want a Sager in Canada I'd go with Reflex Notebook. I spoke with them and they are in my city. They are super nice.

I went with Mythlogic in the US even if I'm in Canada. The reason is that Reflex wasn't offering some options that I wanted like upgradable screen etc...

 

My last complaint, is that I wish the headphone jack pushed more power. Why have a soundcard that can do 24/192, if the jack can't even drive mid-tier cans?

I doubt it. My screen is so bright, it's ridiculous.

On min brightness, it's one touch lower than my M860TU was on max.

 

No complaints about battery life from anyone, or the lack of an option for bigger/external batteries?

 

That's a fairly general complaint you could level at pretty much every manufacturer, particularly the former. Every laptop out there with similar specs gets pretty much the same tepid battery life. Bigger batteries wouldn't be needed if you could solve the former. And on an already not small laptop, they make it a bit unwieldy. That one is personal preference, and depends on how well the manufacturer does it. The HP 9-cell doesn't look too bad, and seems to actually improve the typing angle. Go figure...

 

As for battery life- us old guys that remember the days of P4 based gaming laptops that got 1 hour or so tend to find the 3 hours on these models pretty good for a gaming machine

But you're right, longer battery life is always something that's on the list of wants in any laptop.

 

Hi responding to this post on page four:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/591134-say-something-bad-about-sager-4.html#post7660825

I bought my first Sager out of an ad in Computer Shopper magazine, when it had about 1,000 pages. That was 1989. Yes, that is over twenty years ago.

I flew across the US to pick it up at their location.... I think it was in City of Industry, California, USA.

I've had other used Sager systems since.

I'm not a gamer beyond sol.exe but I'm on a system about 14 hours a day and it needs to be a laptop, it needs to have a good screen, keyboard and touchpad. It needs to be durable and have quality components.

Sager remains my first choice, whether I get it from Sager directly or from my local Michigan reseller who is a member of this community.

 

There's been plenty of complaints already about battery life, just not in the way you're thinking. That is, people have complained about Sager not supporting switchable graphics. By using switchable graphics, Sager laptops could potentially double the amount of hours their laptops could run on battery.

Instead of adding bulkier batteries, Sager can take advantage of the technology is already there (Sandy Bridge's iGPU), but Sager refuses to implement it into their laptops for some odd reason. So, of course Sager could add bigger batteries to their laptops, but why do that when they could just as easily take advantage of switchable graphics to attain the same effect?

Like I mentioned earlier in this thread, Dell has already had switchable graphics in their laptops from the beginning. So, why can't Sager do the same?

 

^^There have been multiple threads about why Sager hasn't implemented it. It's not because of "some odd reason," it's because graphics switching technology simply isn't good enough yet. There are still far too many glitches for it to be worth it on a gaming laptop.

 

Sager doesn't implement it, because it isn't for Sager to implement.

 

What do you mean? It's on the hardware side, unless you mean Clevo needs to implement it?

 

Clevo is the one who manufactured the motherboard so Clevo is the only one who can implement it

 

Right but that's getting nitpicky, and I'm sure Sager has a significant voice with Clevo as to what they want built.

 

POWER ON: Sometimes I would have to press the power button more than once or twice in order for the laptop to power on. This occurs mostly when the AC adapter isn't plugged into the computer. When this happens, it sort of worries me because I ask myself what if one day it wont power on.

Once in a while even when the AC adapter is plugged into the computer, I would have to press the power button more than once. It could be because I'm not pressing hard enough or pressing in the right spot or something else. Either way, it worries me.

FINGERPRINT READER: Very difficult to set up. I still haven't gotten it to set up after 1 week. For some reason, it wont read my fingerprint!

HEADPHONE JACK: Produces low quality sound. I wonder if my jack is defective. I may need to go out and purchase a new headset to confirm. If something is wrong with the input, then I will need to buy a bluetooth enabled headset.

WEBCAM: Produces low quality picture. It's so bad, it makes me wonder if my webcam is defective as well.

Thank goodness the last three items are not THAT big of a deal to me, otherwise, i would have returned my laptop by now, though, the first item worries me.

 

I used to have a Sager NP2090. While overall it was a good laptop, a few things I have to nit pick about it:

Overall outside felt a little cheap. Don't get me wrong, the build quality was fine, but the type of plastic used felt cheap and brittle. I guess another notch against build quality was that two of the buttons on the keyboard fell off. That probably wasn't entirely Sager's fault, as the type of the keyboard used is found on a lot of other laptops, primarily Asus. I replaced it myself, but one of the buttons fell off again.

The lack of notoriety of the brand name hurts too. Case in point is the 8600M GT video card fiasco. While laptops from companies like Dell, HP and Apple had their warranties extended or video cards replaced, I had no such luck or service with mine. Which brings me to my next complaint.

Warranty/customer service. Sager may be widely praised for its customer service and support but I did not elicit the same response. When my video card died, I figured I should contact XoticPC, the company where I purchased my Sager. Being covered under a 3 year labor warranty and with Nvidia picking up the tab for the other major laptop companies, I thought it was worth a shot. They asked me to send the laptop in for inspection. I had to pay for shipping. They received the laptop about four days later, but it took another week and a half to get a response from them after I emailed them for an update. They told me it would cost $445 + return shipping to have the video card replaced. Mind you, this was with labor warranty, they were charging me $400 for the part (the $45 was for the keyboard, which was missing a key. I guess they thought i wanted that fixed too). This was a part i could easily purchase on eBay for $60-80. I said no thanks, and paid the $37 to have the laptop returned to me. So now i'm out $60+ and my laptop is still broken. Now maybe I would have received better service had I purchased the laptop straight from Sager, I don't know, but the experience left a sour taste in my mouth. I've also completely stopped purchasing Nvidia products altogether or recommend it to my family and friends.

I ended up trying to fix the laptop myself (heat gun technique) with no such luck and finally sold the laptop for parts on eBay.

 

I have some problems with current models:
- 1920x1080 max resolution, not 1920x1200
- no Express Card slot
- no video card switching
- under 2H battery life (my M570TU currently has 2h battery life)

Besides that everything is good.

 

Stop griping about lack of 1920x1200, you're not going to find that anywhere else! There's only like one model of one company that produces those anymore (I believe it's the HP Elitebook)

 

I happen to like my 16:10 1920 x 1200 monitor resolution. But sadly people don't like it, and it's hard to find editing programs etc that'd support such a res. None supporting CUDA that I've seen. And in some games, the devs are SOOOOOOOOO lazy that it doesn't support 16:10 fully. When I launch Black Ops: Call of the Dead zombie map in SP, the intro movie that introduces the stars and their names has edges cut off in 16:10.

But like with Vista, where I blame lazy developers simply not caring for the less-than-mainstream market, even though they claim their product(s) is(are) all that and want our money for it(them) rather than the OS itself, which is itself fantastic and STILL preferred by me over Win 7, I will not blame the existence of 1920 x 1200, but rather the software devs who don't bother with it.

I see it as more of a favour giving us 1080p over 1200p in this case though, because we all know I ain't running no game in a letterbox because certain programmers are lazy and I want to make a video. With a monitor limited to 1080p however, that's a different story.

 

For me, the only downside to the NP8170 (the model I own) that I so far have noticed is the lack of a backlit keyboard and a full-sized number pad. Other than that, this machine is a beast and I cannot praise it an more.

 

That's kind of where I was going with my question. I have a 12-cell battery "extender" from my current HP elitebook laptop. The default battery + 12 cell extender can give me over 12 hours of battery life. Do I use the 12-cell extender all the time? No. It's heavy as heck. But it is sure nice to have. It'll be hard for me to switch to a laptop manufacturer without this option. Anyone who has one of these 12-cells would probably tell you the same thing.

 

I think it would be great to see both of those implemented as options (e.g., switchable graphics AND external batteries).

 

@chisox i agree, with my old d820 i had bought an extra battery that fit into the disk drive slot for about 50 bucks, and its awesome it adds a couple hours to the battery life, so i can get about 7 hours out of the thing. it is possible to buy external batteries for these devices, but they are expensive, and you are better off just buying extra batteries.

 

Yeah, the optical drive bay should become more of an "expansion" bay instead on all laptops for either optical drive, HDD/SSD, or battery. Put a connector so you can use a battery in there. Even make it hot swappable. I think some earlier Dell business machines, maybe Thinkpad too, offered this option. I recall at work years ago having both a DVD drive and an extra battery that would fit in the slot so could swap out if needed.

 

yes my d820 can do this, so you can keep it on, and change batteries

 

Man, why don't that do that with all laptops now then? I know there's probably an added cost but well worth the extra $20 or so that gets passed on to the customer. Having the ability to choose what to do with that space is a lot more appealing than being forced with one thing or having to go a third party route, or hack your machine to make it work.

 

Yeah, that's why they dropped the Express Card slot /s.

BTW, because of your avatar I've started watching Star Trek TNG again.

 

Woo Hoo! +1 for JLP!

I believe it's on Netflix free streaming now. I may have to start watching again. I have watched all but about a dozen episodes. I marked down years ago the ones I didn't watch but lost that list. There's like 150+ episodes so not sure if I am going to plow through all of them again. But the pilot episodes are classic where they meet Q. Best damn pseudo-villain ever IMHO.

edit: I've been going rep crazy I guess so can't give out any more rep for anther day. Hopefully I'll remember!

 

I need my card to be able to buy it. I want it so BAD!!!