Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus - NP940X3G

Nice - let us know your thoughts once youve given it a good work in...

 

Don't blame W8, though the updates don't help. If you "refresh" the OS which removes all the samsung bloat and then delete the recovery partition (AFTER you've made the backup) you can get to 100GB free. Depending on your needs, that may still be insufficient.

 

He got the 256, he better have waaaayyyyy more than 100 free without doing anything.

 

Is the keyboard backlighting on that white now? Oh and what brand SSD did it come with?

 

It has a liteon 256 SSD. Back lighting is a very light blue green type color.. easy on the eyes.

 

Did u get the NP900X3F or the NP900X3E??

 

The SSD is good, the backlighting sounds like what they have been using all along and I really never liked it. In one of those in depth reviews they mentioned it was white so I wonder what happened. I don't know why everybody can't back light a keyboard like HP does in their Specters. Pure white and only the letters themselves illuminate. There is no bleed coming through from the gaps around the letters.

 

Well this is just the most updated ivy bridge model so I don't think much has changed other then some of the components, drivers etc.. It will be a real shame if they quit making this matte display. I turned off the adaptive brightness.. man that made it really dark. But its plenty bright at half brightness. What I was really worried about were the speakers. In the store I could not really try them out since it was loud. Let me say, for the size of this device the speakers are very good. That was really my biggest concern so its all gravy as far as I'm concerned. I love this machine. Its nice having something I can honestly say is a better build then a mac. I read somewhere that the components and housing are 1/10000th to spec. Major quality control going on with the book 9.

 

haha jumping ship I see... well i'm considering it too. I think i'll end up with the acer s7 though.

 

Yeah, W8 has nothing to do with it. Once the recovery and "Rapid Start" partitions are gone, you can hit 100. That fills up with games and media easily enough, of course, but otherwise that's a fair bit of space.

(256 also fills up the games and media easily enough. So does 512. I'm not sure why it's so fun to have all these movies that I never watch, but it still makes me happy to know that they're there.)

 

For some reason all the ultrabooks have this same problem, I find it quite annoying. I just stream movies from the windows video store, much easier and better quality.

Sent from my Nexus 7 using Tapatalk 2

 

Birthday is fast approaching just over a week left, and still no real reviews of this machine, the F model is available right now, but I am guessing it will be worth the little extra wait for the G model. Come on Samsung, its taking ages.

EDIT: I am skeptical about ultra long battery life, however the QHD screen is what keeps me from getting F model. Can any convince otherwise?

 

Haswell, 1800P, 8GB. I am patiently waiting. The hold up has probably more to do with Windows 8.1.

 

I could probably make due with 480-512GB, I have a lot of HD movies (never know what I'll want to watch on the plane). But for now, I just bring a usb3 1TB along. Doesn't help as much if you're a big gamer, but then again, the graphics are probably more frustrating.

 

I'm starting to think about the new MBA. It has better graphics(5000), wireless AC, PCI SSD which is much faster and you can buy the 256GB version for around $1200. I just wish it had a slighter better resolution and a KB that didn't drive me crazy. I did get used to it on my 2011 11.6" version but I'm not sure I really want to deal with that again..still it's the best deal going right now.

 

I was thinking about it myself, however the dreadful screen res is really underwhelming. I am going to migrate from 1368x768 and the improvident is going to be barely noticeable for the new MBA. SSD speeds will be barely noticeable with regards to day-2-day usage, the 5000 is marginally faster than the GPU in 9+ and after all its Win8 and touch, so cant be that bad. The QHD is a deal maker for me, I want that panel.

 

Forgive my ignorance but what is the " MBA".?

Thanks.

 

Macbook Air

 

Much faster at what? The sequential read/write speeds are indeed impressive, but random read/write speeds are similar to their SATA siblings. And guess what is still the main limiting factor in disk performance... random read/write speeds. The PCI SSD is clearly the better choice, but it's not a game changer, not in the MacBook Air anyway.

Graphics wise, you should take a look at some benchmarks for the HD 5000 inside the 2013 Air: results are better than HD 4400 and HD 4000, but things get a bit mixed up when TDP limits come into play.

 

I will still take both the PCI SSD and 5000 craphics over the alternatives any day..especially when you get them for about $500 less. My issues with the MBA I already mentioned but the SSD and graphics chip aren't among them.

 

Would love to pick up one of these models. Although I have a few drawbacks, I hate win 8. Will format the SSD and install win 7 immediately. So thouch-less is preferable. There are really no good decent prices ultrabooks out there unfortunately.

 

Why would you format W8 for W7 when you can just run W8 in desktop mode and never see the metro interface for the rest of the time you own it? Of course the other downside to that is you really won't want to run a QHD+ display on windows 7 even if they let you which I doubt they will.

 

You don't get them for 500$ less, you get what you pay for.

 

Do you mind explaining or posting a guide on how to "refresh" the OS? I'd love to get rid of all of this bloat...Going to order a USB stick tonight so I can remove the recovery partition as well.

 

How to restore, refresh, or reset your PC - Microsoft Windows Help

; )

 

I used to say the same thing but since I got my NP900X3E-K01US 13.3-Inch yesterday I have to say the I definitely like whats under the hood on W8. I'm not spending too much time on the modern side. I have been changing associations to desktop apps, like VLC, viewers etc.. Much of W8 is still W7. I have not seen any decent metro apps. Mostly have been uninstalling them lol. I think its hard for devs to code with what is given them from MS. One example is MS own skype metro app. Its so bad I could not believe it. And they own that which is really embarrassing. So I just installed the desktop version. But not too worry, W8 can be tamed. Out of the box, yes, its amazingly bad. That's because many of the associations throw you into modern when you are working in desktop.. which is jolting and not appreciated. I think the biggest failure for modern apps is their desktop equivalents are better. But the weather app looked good and it will get better. You don't want to miss out later on when the improvements come across.

With my NP900X3E-K01US 13.3-Inch it also does not have touch but W8 is not so bad. Mainly since I bought a MS blue tooth sculptor mouse which has gesture and start button support. The touch pad on the book 9 is also excellent which is important. If you have a decent touch pad the touch screen is not much of an issue. But if you don't, better start looking for one of those start menu add ons.

 

It says at this link that:
"All of your personal files will be deleted and your settings will be reset. Any apps the came with your PC will be reinstalled, but all other apps will be removed."

The key here is:
"Any apps the came with your PC will be reinstalled..."

So that seems to say that the bloat ware will be reinstalled, doesn't it?

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

Just tried it, as well as the "remove everything and reinstall windows" function. Both kept the bloatware with the installation. I decided to just manually remove what I could with CCleaner (highly recommended).

EDIT: I also find it incredibly interesting to see all the people who got tired of waiting for the 9+ and picked up the ivy bridge matte model instead. Seems like Samsung's idea of being fashionably late to the haswell ultrabook scene is going to bite them in the butt.

 

Ever consider it is on purpose? Samsung is both clearing out old inventory sitting in the shelves as well as profiting from people who are impatient.

 

Exactly. Although I believe there is some actual delay maybe due to Win 8.1 but they could just release it with Win 8 - to me it also looks a bit like a strategy.

 

If you are running the Book 9 Plus, won't the high resolution work really badly on Windows 7?

In fact, will most applications look normal even on Windows 8 on a high resolution screen like that? Aren't most of them not made for higher resolutions?

 

This ad might be saying you won't even be able to run it at the highest resolution under windows 7. It says QHD+ available depending on windows version and also seems to say that FHD is the standard mode.

Samsung ATIV Book 9 Plus - Superior performance in craftmanship design legacy

 

I am prepped for 9+ welcome party. I already got a Win8 Pro x64 customized image on a dedicated USB ready to wipe all partitions (inc recovery) this will maximize machines performance + most likely even boost battery life a notch. The only people who should stay away from this are non-technical, casual, coffee-shop surfers, the rest I am sure already do this as standard whenever they purchase any laptop that has custom software etc pre-installed.

 

Well, you may want to make sure you have the procedure and software to reinstall rapid start and maybe rapid storage too. Also, make sure that install USB is in UEFI format or it won't be able to boot from it. You can change from UEFI back to legacy (at least you could on the current models) but I think there may be a disadvantage in doing that but I can't remember now what it is.

 

These are all way too easy (I work as a Wintel engineer), but these are good points for someone who has no previous XP. Changing boot device from UEFI to Legacy has no detrimental effect on performance, you are probably thinking of SATA translation mode (ATA,AHCI,RAID), ATA is the old school with no TRIM support when it comes to SSDs, AHCI is new school (Win7/8 approved for SSD) and RAID/RST etc are prevalent in desktops).

All of the above translation modes can be changed post install if the user forgets to select correct mode from the initial install, but this will involve booting into WinPE and loading offline registry hive to make relevant changes, since in most cases the system will most likely BSOD after making the changes in BIOS.

 

That's strange. When I used "reset" (sorry not "refresh") all the bloat was gone as well as all the drivers. Perhaps in later models Samsung have moved to a bloated preimage. That's a shame, why would they do that when there is recovery if you want the bloat back?

I'm thinking a lot of these OEMs are bidding their time on Haswell and trying to ship out as much ivy as they can. No MS Surface, MBPr, XPS 13, the list goes on. Many are probably waiting for 8.1 as well, new drivers may be a concern. Having the end user do the upgrade may be undesirable.

 

I agree it's nice to have a clean install, made progressively difficult now that media is rarely included. But keep in mind you would want a backup of the original system state for warranty purposes.

 

True that, I always create a ghost image prior wipe to an external HDD

 

For a while I had also been advocating Refresh as an alternative to clean install, then learned that with the 2013 models it doesn't actually remove the bloat. That's too bad. I had to do a mea culpa post in the Series 7 / AB 8 Owners Lounge and subsequently wrote this post which is now my recommended guidance for bloat cleanout.

 

Those NP900X3E-K and NP900X3F models are either just released or still popping up

or people who don't want a gimmick display but prefer a true matte FHD lightweight device

 

You'll probably be in for a surprise when/if you restore that image some day, and discover that you cannot boot Recovery. It's one of the quirks of these Sammies. Do yourself a favor and use Recovery's built-in feature to make a Bootable Factory Image backup on a 32GB USB stick before you wipe the disk.

At the very least, use Clonezilla instead of Ghost to make your image. We have a single report (from go45cvi) of a successful restore using that -- which is more than we have from any other imaging tool besides Recovery itself.

Read more about it in the recent thread linked below (or the thousand posts across all threads in the Samsung forum).

http://forum.notebookreview.com/sam...red-recovery-partition-samsung-notebooks.html

Even if you always want to use clean installs (I do too), being able to restore to factory is very convenient if you ever (A) need Samsung Service, as they may require a factory restore to prove that you didn't mess up the machine; or (B) you want to sell the machine some day.

 

Thanks I ll give it a go, I am not sure Clonezilla is a good enough tool for this that I would trust, I have used it before its and clunky and very slow.. I have Ghost15 and Ghost 11.5.1 for corporate use- of the thousands of images I done thus far throughout my career, they have never failed me really. I assume the boot quirks are to do with UEFI boot sectors, but assuming I ghost via legacy mode, this should not be an issue, either way I am certain, I will get the machine to boot if it has the right bootsector one way or the other.

 

No, that's not what it is, the problem is the same on MBR disks. It's how the F4 link is stored. Please read the links I posted.

And I agree that Clonezilla is messy, this wasn't a recommendation on my part. In fact, the one time I tried it, it wasn't able to restore at all.

My recommendation is to use Recovery and backup to a bootable USB stick. It allows you to run it anytime you want, even after wiping partitions.

 

http://www.amazon.com/Samsung-ATIV-...dp/B00DVFMDN8/ref=amtcd_B00D4AX6DG_B00DVFMDN8

the same link on amazon is now a 404. the UK link is still intact, however.

 

I used Recovery's built in feature to make a Bootable Factory Image backup of my NP900X3E-A02US and it fit on a 16GB stick.
Did I miss something?

Otherwise, I have done a true clean install with my own Windows 8 media and license, and may wait for 8.1 RTM, or may drop back to 7, not sure.

 

There was still at least one issue with the specs but I am surprised it has been removed completely. Maybe Samsung is having issues getting this out.

 

nm..........................

 

Thanks, that is very encouraging indeed. I even notice that it lists "HD+", 1600×900, which seems to be the sweet spot for 13" displays (1920x1080 really does seem too high for me personally).

 

You should be fine, if it fits it fits, as long as you checked the Create Boot Disk option. The Factory Image is different size for different models. Series 7 / AB 8 owners consistently report that a 16GB stick is too small and 32GB needed. But Series 9 doesn't have all the AMD stuff, keeping it a bit smaller.

I think you chose a good approach there

 

Ah come on, it's not that bad. Ok, every time I use it I have to run through the options multiple times to figure them out.
And yes, it retained F4 functionality for me when I restored the image. But this was W7. I have no idea whether it still works on a UEFI W8 setup. If you want to give it a try, create the bootable thumb drive using tuxboot.