**OFFICIAL Sager NP5125/Sager NP5135/Clevo B5130M Owner's Lounge**

No restocking fee?

 

Pretty sure there's never a restocking fee, unless you have a custom painted cover.

 

I have to admit, I have no complaints with my 5125.

In fact, I'm not sure that I'd even want to trade it in for the new one because my 1080p FHD screen is (so far) pristine. I've seen the other complaints Re: stuck or dead pixels and counted myself lucky that I cannot find a single bad one on my screen.

I just know my bad luck that I would send it in, it would take an unexpectedly long time to come back to me, and then I would find some (but not enough) dead pixels in my new screen.

So, while it sucks that there was such a short upgrade cycle since I bought mine, I'm so far quite happy with it. I don't think that I want to trade in my beautiful screen for a moderate upgrade.

 

Unfortunately not. Only customers within the 30 Day Return Policy. Remember you basically lose 3 legs of shipping for those within the return period. The original shipping of the 5125 to you, returning the 5125 and the new shipment of the 5135. Also keep in mind if you have been using it for a few weeks often times you can have wear marks or light surface scratches in the notebook from taking it in and out of your bag or regular use. If these show, Sager will deduct for these if they need to replace surfaces with new ones.

 

Justin,
How is the new webcam?

 

I personally have not seen it yet. We have a evaluation unit on the way.

 

People returning their laptops, what program did you use to wipe your hard drive? Sager doesn't care if you return a notebook with the OS removed, do they?

 

Not sure if they care, but "Darik's Boot And Nuke" is a great util to wipe a drive. Just burn the ISO, boot with it and follow the on screen instructions.

 

Waffling b/w the 5135 and a compal nblb2 system. If the compal's webcam is pretty decent I might just go with them since it is a know entity. Anyone with an nblb2 based system care to comment on it's webcam?

Thanks

 

i second this, DBAN is your best bet.

 

just out of curious, what antivirus software is everyone using with this laptop? just wuld be interesting to see

 

Aight! all of you ubuntu lovers out there (like me) seems like optimus and linux does't go hand in hand for the time being, nvidia said it's not planing to support optimus on linux.

either way, optimus or not, the gpu as it is doesn't work in linux atm cos the hardware of optimus is a bit different, the nvidia gpu connects to the igpu and not to the screen like any other laptop, so you can't configure it just to use the nvidia gpu since it can't write to the screen without the proper drivers.

thus leaving us with the igpu (which is not bad for some nice compiz eye candy), first of all, don't install the nvidia drivers, it'll result in black screen, second, follow the steps on this guide to make sure the computer doesn't power up the nvidia gpu and waste precious battery power on it.

 

Yeah, I saw this. I am running Ubuntu right now, but was planning on running FreeBSD on the 5135. Do you know if running Win 7 in a VM would allow Optimus to work? I have never run a VM, currently dual boot. Really disappointing that Nvidia has really fallen down on the job with their loyal linux fan base.

 

Well! I got my NP5125 today, and my happiness quickly turned into frustration which has lasted all day as I struggle to figure out a bunch of problems that I can't find solutions to. So, three things:

1) Anyone else find the "Protector Suite 2009" that's included unable to find your fingerprint reader even though it's installed?
Edit: Actually, after uninstalling the biometric drivers, it's like the fingerprint reader is totally gone!

2) Optimus refusing to use the NVIDIA GPU for more than a second no matter how demanding the program.

3) Fan running at full speed when web-browsing!

Anyone have these problems and solutions? :/ I've installed all the drivers and everything. Ergh! If these weren't huge annoying problems I'd be really happy with it. Even happier that I'm probably one of the extremely few NP5125 owners who got the i5-460 processor. Though at this rate I may end up with a 5135 after all if the fingerprint reader keeps acting completely broken.

 

Number 3. It's unfixable. I've tried just about everything. Even went as far as replacing the thermal paste between the heatsink and GPU to Arctic Silver 5. No luck.

 

Shoooooooot.

I really LOVE my laptop and have no complaints, but upgrading seems like the smart thing to do...

ahhhhh.

 

The 425m isn't that much better than the 330m. It's kind of pathetic that nvidia can't put out a better gpu than the ATI 5650 in the same price range. And the upgrades in cpu's are really negligible, especially when you consider the i5-460m has a lower bus speed, and that sandy bridge is coming out in a couple months. The only reason I'm returning my 5125 is because of its display issue; otherwise upgrading to 5135 wouldn't be worth being without a good laptop for two weeks.

What are your settings in nvidia control panel? As far as I know, you can't permanently switch on the dGPU. You can select which gpu the computer uses for each application, but it will only switch on for graphics intensive programs. I didn't play any games with mine, but playing any video in mpc always turned the light orange; although, the iGPU works just fine for video playback and the dGPU made the exhaust really hot, so I always manually turned the gGPU off.

 

My settings -would- have it use the dGPU for everything, except they won't save. And even with OPTIMUS on, it uses the iGPU for most games unless I force it, which is a good enough solution that I can't really complain about it anymore.

 

Can someone tell me the battery life of this laptop?

 

Does anyone know if Sager uses different manufacturers for the 1080p lcd panel for the NP5125? I had to get my screen replaced for a second time, and it seems that the vertical viewing angle is a lot worse on the replacement than I remember on the previous screen I had. Even slight movement of the screen vertically is noticeable now, and I don't remember it being like that before. Also, the screen seems more washed out. I used UDPixel to test using the black screen, and the black level seems more washed out.

The Hardware Id in Device Manger for the screen I have is HSD06A5. If anyone has anything different, please let me know. Thanks.

 

Just checked and mine has the same ID. I think they may have given you another bad screen, man. :/

 

Can someone tell me the battery life of this laptop? Also, is xoticpc.com only place to get this laptop? And what is the average time it takes for this laptop to arrive? I see people mention it takes 1 month?? Also, does the np5135 look exactly like the np5125?

 

I received my 5125 nine days after ordering from sagernotebook.com. I never tested my battery, but I think battery life will vary widely with specs and settings, averaging around 3.5 hours. I would be surprised if the 5135 looked any different.

 

green pixels started appearing on my computer also!!
it usually happens when i open the comp and then i immediately restart it and everything is fine, but now they appeared once after my comp was on for more than a day... had to restart and it was fixed, was running on intel only, so its not an optimus thing for sure...

i heard other people who had that, did anyone tried living with it or did you all RMA? i live in israel RMA would cost 200$ of shipping....

 

I returned my 5125 yesterday because of a display issue. During the two weeks I used it, I noticed many SD videos had tons of stutter problems. I thought the videos themselves were faulty, or the stutter was because of upscaling to 1080 res, but I am watching the same videos on my old Dell with 1050 res and don't notice any stutter. Particularly, anime videos would always stutter during panning shots but play smoothly otherwise. 1080p videos would play fine, but low res vids had lots of stutter. Really pissed at myself that I returned my 5125 before doing more comparisons with my Dell.

Anyone notice video playback problems like this? Not sure if I should buy the 5135 now...

 

There are lots of Sager resellers, including PowerNotebooks.com.

Sager has them in stock and they are shipping daily. There was a time when the Sager NP5125 was backordered and there was a delay in shipping, but not at this time.

Yes, they look exactly alike.

 

Thanks Tokeli. Something like that can vary that much with the same exact panel model? Do me a favor if you can, when you tilt the screen back and forth just a few inches, or even just move your head up and down when you're looking at the screen, do you see a noticeable change in brightness, color change, or color saturation? I replaced the other two screens because they had light spots and what looked like dust inside the screen. This one also has a light spot too, but its small and at the edge of the screen, so I'm willing to live with it. That's why I'm shocked to believe the same panel model can vary this much in viewing angle, contrast, etc.

 

Can anyone else confirm that battery life is 3.5 hours? that is a lot of battery life for a 15.6 laptop.

 

My 5125 didn't have great viewing angles, but they were acceptable. Small downward angles caused pretty bad color saturation, but I only noticed color change for one color.

 

Ok, well for instance, if I'm watching a Blu-ray movie, the black bar at the top is acceptable, whereas the black bar at the bottom is extremely washed out, as if the brightness or gamma was set way too high. If anyone else is experiencing (or not experiencing) something similar, please let me know.

 

You should be able to get over 3 hours if you turn down the brightness and put it in power saver mode if you're doing just web browsing, word processing, etc. Don't expect that if you're watching video, etc.

There are other places you can order it, such as PCTorque.com. I'm pretty sure both look exactly the same, just a slightly upgraded CPU, GPU, and webcam.

 

It's true. It's the selling point of this laptop... fairly powerful discrete gpu available when needed, with a long battery life when on integrated gpu at other times.

 

I had stuttering video playback as well - "tearing" effects using VLC. And that was with the Nvidia active. I figured out that it was because I turned off Windows Aero. Once I turned that back on, the tearing went away and all the videos I play look fine. I don't understand why Aero matters to VLC, but there you have it.

I haven't posted much, but I just got this laptop last Monday. Of course, it's obsolete now :-( But I'm happy. The screen really is beautiful (no problems on mine). The keyboard is fine to me, although I can see what is mean by it being flexible (if you type with one hand while resting the other on the keyboard, you can feel vibrations with the resting hand). The only complaint I have so far is the mousepad buttons make a fairly loud "clack" sound when pressed - makes me want to use tap on the mousepad as much as possible.

 

i can achieve 4-4.5hours or so if i go full power saving

but regular use, internet surfing 3 -3.5 hours aprox. at most

and watching a movie on the intel GPU, about 2.5 hours

those are all the things ive tried on battery so far.

but just so u know, the antivirus u use, CAN make a large different on battery life (up to 30 mins diff if not more sometimes) so choice of AV is pretty important, im using Avast free and thats quite good on system performance and doesnt have high disk usage (which is typically the biggest battery killer with AV's)

 

hey someone correct me if im wrong but in the video review that XOTICPC had on this didn't justin say that it does not support multi-touch gestures?

Well either i heard wrong or he was wrong but i have full multi-touch. Pinch Zoom. Two finger scroll, rotate. the build quality is great i don't know how anyone can say anything bad about build quality. this thing is sold no noise from the plastic it is built like a rock. only complaint the lid does flex slightly if you press down really hard but regular use it is fine..One thing that annoys me is the speakers man they are horrible..can we start a mod on replacing these speakers?

 

well franquely i haven't tried watching movies on windows yet, only in linux, and they work fine, 1080 videos with the igpu are flawless, and the cpu stay clocked at 1.2 GHz, i guess it's a software problem what you've experianced.

about that didn't answer my question about the green dots and blurry screen happenings...

it dff have multi touch it's awsome, too bad i couldn't get it working in ubuntu.
and about the speakers, i was thinking about opening this lappy and see what can you do about the speakers, i need to get more comfty with it, it's too new for me to start opening up and removing things...

either way i'm guessing the speakers themself are fine it's just that the acoustic design is horrible, i'll see what can be done sometime in the future.
if anyone feels brave he can upload pictures and i we could do some brain storming, i happen to have some background with acousting mechanics...

 

Yeah, now that I think about it, my laptop is perfectly fine and I don't want to take the chance of getting a defective one like all these other horror stories. Don't wanna push my luck!

 

Avast.

Free, fast, doesn't eat up a lot of resources. I've had no virus problems since I've used it although it has blocked some attempts.

 

I'm surprised now at the NotebookReview review. The case is not flimsy, the keyboard feels (while not very) solid enough. And you have to press purposefully on the screen to make an imprint. They make it sound like this laptop will fall apart and explode if you sneeze on it.

And getting another, worse-off laptop is exactly why I'm holding out and hoping I can fix this fingerprint reader all by myself without sending it back.

One other bad thing I've noticed is that watching a movie, even on the iGPU, sucks down the battery at an agonizingly fast rate.

 

i didnt notice it draining that fast, aprox 2.5 hours watching a movie on iGPU for me compared to maybe 3.5 hours browsing doesnt seem bad

 

Any way to get a 2-prong AC adapter with this laptop instead of the stock 3-prong? I sometimes travel to countries without grounded outlets.

 

Will double the shaders greatly improve performance?
I am comparing the 330M to the 425M. The 330M performed well in my experience but I am hoping the 425M will really kick its butt.

 

is anyone having problems watching streams from justin.tv. When im watching it constantly hangs and skips frames. Im using chrome and my flash is up to date i tried unchecking hardware acceleration..im running win7 64 ultimate. this must be problem with flash i don't know or might be my wireless. it was fine on my older laptop..UPDATE.i just saw that my ethernet driver was not properly installed so i took care of that.. It is working fine now but will see if it acts up again

 

Considering how it's one of those two-part AC adapters, I don't think you'd have any trouble finding a 2-prong cord for it on eBay or Amazon or something.

I know this has been asked a hundred times, but if there's some kind of solution to running Punkbuster games with Optimus, can someone point me to the relevant post?

 

there is no solution and there most likely wont be one soon because evenbalance are incompetent jokes, and the game publishers that decide to go with them are equally as moronic...

 

It works fine on me. I'm on Firefox. But this is when Optimus is not enabled, this is when the iGPU is being used.

 

I got the green dots during iGPU use, and eventually the dGPU just died. So, I RMA'd.

 

When I had my screen, the viewing angles were amazing. Top, left, right, vitrually 0 change in image quality all the way to 180 degrees.
Except, when below the screen, it got darker and looked bad. So I kept myself right in the middle, with slack to the top, and it always looked phenomenal.

 

Reposting from a few days ago in hopes of getting more responses. The first post got swamped by questions about the 5135.

 

In case you were not able to download the new user manual for the NP5135, see the below link...

Sager NP5135 User Manual

____________________________________________________________________