N130 & N140. Substitutes for NC10

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ndevil/sets/72157622102218867/with/3883662961/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/22046787@N03/sets/72157622226305464/with/3883761701/



Specs: 10.1” 1024 x 600 Display, 945GSE chipset + GMA 950 graphics, 1GB RAM, 160GB HDD, 802.11b/g/n Wi-FI, 0.3MP Webcam.
Ports: 3x USB, VGA out, Card Reader.

Both come with the battery life extender which only recharges the netbook up to 80% on AC power to extend the battery’s life, like seen on the Samsung N120 series.

The N130 has an Atom N270 processor and a paultry 1.5W moono speaker. Comes with a 3-cell (2300 mAh) or 6-cell (4000mAh) battery.

The higher end N140 has an Atom N280 processor, Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR and 3W stereo speakers. Comes with higher capacity 6-cell batteries. (5200 or 5900 mAh)

Both are about 1.27 kg and are 262 x 185.5 x 29.7 mm in size. They will be available in white, black or dark blue. Price: 309 (N130) and 349 euro (N140)

http://netbooked.net/blog/10.1-samsung-n130-n140-netbooks-announced
http://es.engadget.com/2009/09/03/samsung-n140-y-n130-nuevos-netbooks-presentados-ifa-2009/


Video:
http://youtube.es/watch?v=Hz51TmdNm0Q

 

Both use Windows 7 Starter with XP as an option.

 

^^^^ That is awesome.

Hm, this is not much of an improvment though...im sure the price will be low though which will make it appealing. Then again it is hard to make a netbook revolutionary these days they are taking forever with these new ATOM's

 

New Pinetrail Atoms will be shown of at CES in January along with Arrandale processors.

 

I still like my N120 better. It has the soft rounded off edges instead of just being cut off a square, which is much more comfortable.

Not enough changes to even spark my interest!

 

Hey guys, new to the forums.

I have been looking at getting the N120 as my first netbook and have read up a lot about it, but this new N140 has definatly thrown a spanner in the works! I'm in the UK and the N140 is roughly the same price as the N120 which I find astonishing considering it's only been out a few days and has a few extra features, (longer battery life, Windows 7 starter, etc.)

Anyway, I would like to thank OTACORB for your input in the N120 thread from a few months back. You had me totally sold until after going to purchase it online today I saw the N140!

I think I may as well purchase the N140 now as, it's almost identical to the N120, as I said it's the same price as the N120, has a matte screen and supposedly has a longer battery life (uses the 5900 mAh where as the N120 uses the 5600 mAh from what I remember?) I just have one query. I am a noob when it comes to hardware and was wondering if I would be able to upgrade the ram in the N140 to 2gb. If so, isit the same procedure as I would the N120? (i.e same ram type?)

Thanks for any answers and apologies for the stupid question

 

^^^ Yes, just take out the 1GB stick and put in the 2GB. Both use DDR2 ram.

 

Thanks for your quick response man, should I ground myself with one of those wrist straps or is it alright to do it without? It's fairly simple to be done by someone who hasn't done it before isn't it?

 

No need to do that. Yes changing ram is really easy, possibly the easiest upgrade to do on a laptop. Just unplug the computer and take out the battery and you will be fine.

 

N120 best looking netbook ever!!!

 

Any early adopters that wish to post user reviews?

 

Picking mine up today, I can post something afterwards. It comes with just 1 gig of ram and windows xp, both are going straight into the bin.

I plan on swapping out the hard drive, memory, and putting windows 7 on it.
It's a real pity samsung don't offer it in that configuration out-of-the-box.

 

Well, here's a short update. Picked up a white N140, it doesn't suffer from fingerprints quite so badly as the black one. The sparkly white plastic covers them well

Upgraded the memory to 2GB, there's a hatch at the bottom of the case and the single DDR2 SO-DIMM is easily accessible. The shop didn't have any 800Mhz memory so I got a stick of 2GB Kingston 667Mhz RAM. As it turns out the laptop only has a 533Mhz bus so it's fine.

I didn't want to mess with Samsung's standard install, in case I ever need to send the machine back, so I popped in a 160 gig hitachi drive I had lying around. One thing to note is that the samsung drive draws 0.85 amps at 5v, and the hitachi only draws 0.7 amps. Every little helps! I plan on replacing this with an SSD in a few weeks.

Prepped an install of Win7 on to my USB stick, as described on these forums. HP tool didn't work for me, but luckily diskpart from Vista worked fine. I didn't time it, but the whole install took less than half an hour, running on battery. Pretty damn good I think.

Out of the box everything works except WLAN. And for some reason the latest driver available from Samsung (which is marked WinXP) installs fine, but can't connect to WPA2 encrypted network. I found a newer version of the driver on x-drivers.com (1676). Being paranoid, I scanned it first with ESET NOD32 on my machine, then set up the netbook with NOD32 antivirus, then took encryption off my network and updated the antivirus, and only then did I install the driver. The good news is no trojan alerts popped up and it seems to be working fine.
http://www.x-drivers.com/catalog/dr...s/companies/realtek/models/rtl8190/13170.html

I did notice when I took the netbook apart that the connectors for the wireless aerials aren't fully tucked in. I pressed in on the headers to fully engage the contacts. I know some people reported weak wifi signal and intermittent disconnects. I didn't test the netbook long enough yet, but this could be the reason.

BIOS changes: I enabled the setting to only charge the battery to 80% (battery life extender or something similar). I also enabled no execute bit, since Win7 supports DEP.

Battery life seems pretty good, I haven't tweaked any settings yet and I kept all the eye candy on. At 63% charge it still reports over 7h battery life left. Updating the drivers at the moment, just because I'm particular that way, but otherwise the only thing needed beside the Win7 is a wifi driver for Realtek RTL8192E card.

 

N140 looks like the best netbook at the moment: Samsung keyboard, 11 hours battery life, matte screen, 1.3kg.

 

I've had only three issues with the N140 - memory, hard drive and operating system. Upgraded the ram to 2gb (max supported by the platform afaik), replaced the 160gig 5400rpm drive with a 32gig SSD, and installed Windows 7 on it.

It's a perfect little machine now!

Got some pics of the internals if anyone's interested:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/40726835@N08/sets/72157622485818782/

 

Nice job on the review and photos dpajur! I can't help but think that the innards of the NC10 looked better. These new models seem to have smaller heatsinks. I wonder what that does to the noise and heat levels of the system?

It also looks like Samsung generously have provided a space for modders under the front left of the palmrest