Samsung Q320 : 13.4" 16:9 notebook

Its unfortunate, but i dont think you will be buying this laptop.
I did some snooping around for you and found the Q320 datasheet.

http://www.samsung.com/us/pdf/Q320_Datasheet.pdf

It states "Standard System Memory: Up to 4gb"

 

Thanks for the information. I will look for other brand and models.

 

I just bought one of these in white.

It has everything I've been looking for (except fingerprint reader) at a great price!

I used to have a Dell XPS M1330 but this is much better.

 

Where did you buy it from with a 500GB HDD?
Also... are you satisfied with the battery life?
How easy is to achieve the 4 hours and what it takes?
Because I've just ordered one from best buy for 1150$

 

Can you post some pictures and video of your white q320?
please.

I wanna see it :]

@dragoshell
500gb?
I think mine is 320gb.

 

Check his signature:


Intel Core 2 Duo P8700 2.53GHz | 4 GB DDR2 SDRAM | Nvidia Geforce G105M 256MB | 13.4" LED backlit LCD | Hitachi 500GB SATA HDD 5400 RPM | Slot-load DVD+-RW | Intel 802.11b/g/n WLAN | Bluetooth module | 6-cell li-ion battery | Windows Vista Premium SP2

 

yea i saw that after i posted.
:]

 

Here's a pic of mine =D

 

It came with a 320GB. I swapped in my 500GB from my former notebook, an XPS M1330.

I am very satisfied with the battery life. With wi-fi and bluetooth on, the estimate shows at least 4 hours and up to 4 hours 50'ish minutes.

I hope you applied the $100 digital dollars for your order. See my thread here:

http://www.redflagdeals.com/forums/showthread.php?t=783773

 

Aww man, +Rep for Sweet color I always liked white on notebooks

 

I tried to modify my order, adding the code, it worked, but once I got the order finalized they canceled it because it went out of stock.

I search all the stores for one in stock by calling them, because the on-line stock is out of date, and when I finally find one that has it and try to order it, surprise! Before I am logged in to submit the credit card info, the code seems to be working, but it is not applied; so I go back and reenter it, only to get a message saying that it's invalid!?!

HTML:

Promotions and Special Offers will appear below after you enter your Digital Dollars.

Invalid Digital Dollars: PIZZZ100205453908548

PizzaPizzaV3 $10 Off	PizzaPizzaV3 $10 Off	PIZZZ010205416642606
PizzaPizzaV3 $20 Off	PizzaPizzaV3 $20 Off	PIZZZ020205435275577

Now I hate them so hard, I don't even think I want the laptop anymore... I spent half of my day trying to order this thing

Maybe I'll just order a pizza and get the coupon so that I go in store and use it. That if I'm lucky enough and it doesn't sell out

 

I got this too. You have to create another account using another e-mail address. Apparently they keep track of the digital dollar codes used by e-mail address.

 

Yeah, I finally got that
I'm picking it up tomorrow.
Thanks for the tip!

 

really want this laptop

Whats the best price for it in the uk
The 2.0ghz model is probably the only one i can afford(poor student).

Can someone link me to the cheapest price thanks

 

After a few days of use...
I love the notebook, great performance, battery life, superb LCD, but have a few complains:

- a small crack appeared in the LCD black cover/frame near the web-cam, starting from the protective rubber; it's about 0.5cm in length, barely visible, but I'm afraid that other cracks might appear as well or even this one could get bigger. I guess it's because the rubber pushes into the LCD frame when the lid is closed and inside the backpack.

- the other thing is related to the battery locking-switches; one of them seems to open by itself, but not completely, just half-way, enough to allow the battery to move a little bit.

So it got me thinking about the overall built-quality of the laptop and I'm curious to find out from the other owners if any of you got any problems with yours so far?

 

I have no issues, but I don't carry mine in a backpack.

 

It's a Kensington 15" Contour Notebook Backpack, so it has a special padded notebook compartment, which should protect the laptop well enough.

 

My battery is a little wobbly too, but it's no issue for me.

 

No issues for me.
Battery secure and no lid crack.

[edit]
Actually, I have two issues, not mentioned yet.

1, the battery seems to be dying alot faster than when i first bought it.
like 2.5-3hrs.
Never really paid attention, but it feels like it.

2, the powered usb on the left side, doesnt work for me.
Isnt it supposed to continually charge something even when the laptop is off?

 

I'm also experiencing your second issue. What device are you trying to charge? I'm trying to charge my iPhone but it's not working, I thought it may be because of the iPhone itself.

 

You need to check the power consumption when running on battery. I use RMClock but there are other packages which can do this. Power consumption in Watts x hours of operation = Watt-hours. The battery label should give the rating (Voltage x capacity in Amp-hours = Watt hours).

Check the BIOS to see if this feature needs to be enabled. Also, on my Dell E6400, if I power down the computer then I need to remove / reconnect the device I am charging. This signals to the computer that I want to charge the device and it is not something that was left plugged in when i turned off the computer.

John

 

I also remember seeing in BIOS an option to enable the powered usb as it was disabled by default.

As for my crack an the lid (which can only be seen in strong light) - I'll have to replace the laptop and hope that it won't happen again with the next one

 

I ordered this Tuesday of last week from Best Buy and got it that Friday even with standard ground shipping. It's a great laptop and is easily the fastest computer I've ever owned(depending upon whether you consider a PS3 a PC which I don't). I can't wait till October 22nd. I'm planning on ordering Windows 7 Home Premium for $30 thanks to the student discount.

Overall, I'm extremely pleased with my purchase, although I was mad to find out that they dropped the price from $929.99 to $879.99 two days after I ordered. I quickly got over it though and just considered it a $50 premium for getting it the same week I ordered. I can run software a lot better now especially the Zune software. I can have the visuals on premium and it not even slow down, which is incredible to me since on my old laptop I had the settings set to low/medium and it would bog down a lot. In other words, it's a lot better than my old laptop and was definitely worth the money I spent. I'd recommend it to anyone.

 

Well, can't you get a refund? And also the notebook qualifies for a FREE upgrade to Windows 7 Home Premium (since it comes with Vista Home Premium installed) when it will be launched.

 

Yeah, I already have filled the thing out, but the orders won't ship until sometime between January 1st and February 28th, 2010. I don't feel like waiting that long though lol. Is the copy they are sending going to be restricted to Samsung laptops or could I use it on my sisters Dell?

 

Can't you have Best Buy price match themselves? $50 is fifty bucks!

 

You're right. I filled out the contact us form and asked about it. It said I should get a reply shortly. They'll probably not doing anything, but you're right anyway. $50 is a lot of money.

 

I`m not really sure how the upgrade thing works, if you are able to use it on another computer or not. My guess is that you can, but you`d better google for that or ask in another forum where they can help you out

I also have another kinda stupid question for the other owners of this laptop: what is the color of the LED while charging on yours?
I had mine exchanged because of the crack, and now it's
- red while plugged in
- blue when it's unplugged
- green when fully charged
but I remember seeing it orange on the old one instead of red
I know it's a silly question, though I am curious if my memory serves me right if there are laptops with orange instead of red.

I also noticed that this new one comes with a lower-quality LCD panel, because it does not display the same contrast with the gray levels.

Is there a way to find out what's the manufacturer of the panel? In device manager just says Generic PnP Monitor and I also noticed that I have two refresh rates to select from: 59Hz and 60Hz, which is odd.

 

I would expect it to be like other notebook manufacturer's versions of Windows and will search for the Samsung BIOS. There may also be other tricks such as needing a product key which is in a range allocated to Samsung.

John

 

Ok, i've had the computer for a few days now, and here is my mini-review, running Windows 7 and with the Intel T3400 as cpu.
What i wanted:

• 13" to 14" bright screen, preferably with good colors and wide viewing angles of course
• Geforce or Radeon graphics card to do emulation and light gaming.
• Quiet operation
• Not heavier than 2.2 kg
• Good performing or upgradable Intel CPU
• Good battery life (4+ hours)
• Synaptics touch pad, since they have little lag and good resolution compared to ALPS ones ( and nice multi touch drivers, as I discovered )
• Preferably a keyboard with dedicated Home, pgup, pgdn and End keys, and no flex.

Opinions on what i got:

The good

• The synaptics touch pad is amazing. Actually better than the macbooks' touch pad which could become unresponsive to taps sometimes (I borrowed one and compared them side by side). It works perfectly with the two-finger-scroll google-code project (search google), so you get all that multi touch beautiful action. The synaptics drivers tap-zones are also amazing, where you can set each corner of the touchpad to do almost anything you like. I almost never mis-tap, because it's natural to do ordinary left-click taps in the middle of the pad. Never ever that I want anything other than a synaptics again.
• The keyboard feels nice, but the resistance of the keys is a bit smaller than most laptops, which gives your fingers weaker feedback about if a key has been depressed or not, which can lead to slightly more typos, but also faster typing speed. The spacing between the keys are also smaller, which makes it harder to tell which key your fingetip is on, i e less precision, which sometimes leads to typos.
• As someone else said, the audio out has no static that I can hear at least.
• The layout of the keyboard is perfect, with a column of Home, PageUp, PageDown and End keys on the far right side.
• Slot in dvd-burner. Will probably replace it with an Intel SSD later.
• E-sata port
• Bright display compared to a macbook pro 13"

The bad

• Pretty bad display colors and vertical viewing angles.
• The touch pad has some dead-zones close to the edge, i e you see more than what you get. Also, the touchpad is slightly recessed into the chassis, which makes is slightly harder to depress the buttons, which by themselves in turn have slightly more resistance than I like. But I don't tend to use them so much after discovering multi-touch right click.
• It's much thicker than a macbook pro (aluminium unibody)
• In Windows 7, as previously reported, the brightness adjustment and speed/fan controller programs randomly stops working. The speed/fan program is easy to restart by first killing it the task manager, the brightness adjustment you seem to have reboot to get working again. The windows brightness adjustment still works though, which is just slightly more inconvenient. Will hopefully get better when samsung releases updated software for Win 7.
• It's LOUD, if you want to get decent performance out it. If you put it in "Silent mode", it clocks down the cpu to 46%, and stops the fan, or runs it at low speed. At normal speed, it spins the fan all the time which is pretty disturbing. I'm just glad it's possible to shut of at least.
• I don't like glossy screens, so I plan to buy a matte-screen-film to put on top of it.
• The lid is a fingerprint magnet
• Pretty bad speakers, facing down, forwards. I'm investigating if it's possible to replace them. There is pretty much space around them when I took the laptop apart.
• I didn't get any intel wi-fi chip or draft-n capability in my version of the laptop (the cheapest one here in sweden)
• Maximum 4GB of ram, not very important for me though.
• Average battery-life, between two and three hours.
• Supposedly a bit tricky to get Fn-keys working in linux.
• The Namuga brand webcam is about as bad as most others out there, with lousy refresh rates in bad lighting.

Since I value a good keyboard layout and touchpad, i can live with most of the shortcomings. The only real competitor (fulfilling the above specifications) would be the dell studio 14 (model number 1450, not 14z, which have a lousy ALPS touch pad), which have similar specs and a better screen, but is only sold in south east asia (goddammit!) But, again, comparing it to a macbook unibody it's evident how much the size, battery, screen, and noise levels suck on this and most other laptops with able graphics chips (not Intel). The macbooks are super thin, completely quiet at full speed, good screen, and terrific longevity. Too bad the boot camp touch pad drivers still don't allow you to change sensitivity or real multi touch capablities. The new HP Envy 13 seems like an interesting new laptop, comparable to the macbooks. Brand of the touchpad on that one still unknown though.

 

Yeah, I figure it will be like that. I really want Windows 7. I guess I can wait a few more months. I was planning on just buying it for $30 and then upgrading my sister's dell if I could, but I knew how the OEMs always used to have their own "versions" of Windows on the disks.

Also, when charging on mine, the charging led is orange, and when fully charged, it turns green. I haven't noticed a red led.

 

Thanks for the mini-review.

In regards to color and contrast, you can greatly improve this by doing the following:

- right click on desktop and select Nvidia Control Panel
- select 'Desktop Color Settings'
- adjust Digital Vibrance up +20% or to your liking
- adjust Contrast to 75% or your liking

I had the same problems with Fn keys losing functionality in Win7. I re-installed software and drivers from the System DVD it came with and so far it's working (knock wood).

>update< still loses functionality

You may want to investigate the great skins they have for the Q320 at http://www.sgpstore.com/index.php/cPath/23_71, including a white or black leather one so the fingerprint problem goes away.

>update< got the skin and unlike the pictures, there is no cut-out for the samsung logo--looks bad!

I get longer battery life than you: between 4 and 5 hours doing surfing. It may be because I have the P8700 CPU. You may want to try undervolting with RMClock.

 

According to their own policy, you should get the difference back:

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp?type=page&contentId=1043363603302&id=cat12098

 

Yeah, but it says it's an outlet center item on the page and the page you linked me to says it doesn't apply to outlet center items.

Edit: Well I got an email today from customer service that they were going to give the $50 back!

Thank you so much for suggesting this, otherwise I would never have known Best Buy did price matches lol. This policy and their great customer service has definitely shined a new, good, light upon my view of the company.

Also, the computer has been running great since I received it on Friday.

Viewing angles aren't the best, but they're good enough I suppose.

It takes a long time to charge compared to my sister's two-year-old Dell Inspiron E1405 which even has a 12-cell battery, but that's not really a problem for me.

Other than those annoyances, it's been a very nice laptop.

 

I have figured out how to easily get Fn-functionality back. Just go to C:\Program Files\Samsung\Easy Display Manager and double-click dmhkcore.exe. Brightness and volume adjustment functionality has now been restored!

Also, I don't agree that the laptop is loud. Yes, the fan runs almost all the time but at very low RPM. Also (but this may be personally), I like that the fan speed is constant and the fan doesn't go off-on-off-on like on other laptops.

 

Thanks for that! + rep

Extending this, I set the compatibility mode of this .exe file to Vista SP2. I'll see if that eliminates the Fn key problem once and for all!

 

Is Samsung Update Plus working for anyone here? It just tells me that my internet connection isn't working.

 

I get the same thing....

 

Samsung Update Plus works for me, but I'm still running Vista so it seems like the problem is with Windows 7.

On a side note, did anyone else apply for the free copy of Windows 7? I did it about a week ago and I haven't received contact from them via email or phone.

Also, when you guys uploaded a copy of your receipt, did you actually scan the form that came shipped with the laptop, or did you just Prt Sc it and cover your CC number? I did the latter by going to my BB order status, viewing the receipt, Print Screen-ing it, pasting it into Paint, and Painting over the CC number, but I still don't know if that is acceptable since Samsung hasn't contacted me.

 

I scanned my actual receipt from Future Shop....it was the one where I exchanged it for another one because my original had a bum optical drive.

 

Hmm... I received a "Packing List" with the notebook when I got it, but it says on the bottom it can't be used as a receipt, so I'm guessing that Print Screening is alright in this case since it's the only receipt I have.

I take it you purchased yous in a Future Shop store vs. online?

Also, did you get an email from Samsung after filling the form out?

And if anyone else is reading this who purchased their's online from Best Buy, how did you deal with the receipt and did you hear back from Samsung afterwards.

Thanks for the help.

 

I did not get an e-mail after filling the form out.

I arranged an in-store pickup at Best Buy, but stopped off at a Future Shop along the way as it was closer. I showed them the deal I got and they price matched it.

 

No, that's just messing with the properties of the image that's being displayed, I was talking about the actual performance of the LCD panel, which is a lower-quality one, I know that for sure.
As I said, there are certain differences in build-details from the precedent laptop (same model); the most obvious one is that the model number is not written in the lower-right corner of the lid.

 

I am on my third one (first had bad optical drive, second had 1 dead pixel), and none of them had Q320 on the lower-right corner of the lid.

I did see some display models with that. Also, my LED is orange if charging, green if fully charged, or not lit up at all if unplugged.

My display seems to be the same from the start. Even with my former XPS M1330 I have used around 20% more digital vibrance.

 

Thanks for your answer. I'm really curious if all the laptops have the same panel or not; but I'll let it go, before I find myself with a screwdriver in one hand and with many pieces of the laptop on the floor

I know that Samsung does sell monitors under the same model number with different panel makers, or it used to do this one year ago, so it's highly probable that they do the same thing with their laptops; what if their factory can't provide enough panels for all the laptops they make? They have to buy from another manufacturer, right?

And yes, just checked again, the LED while charging is a pinkish red, unlike the previous one that looked more orange. But I don't mind that

 

hmmmm....I just double checked and my LED is red when charging now.

 

I just took a picture of my receipt, since I don't have a scanner, then sent it to samsung.. but I too have not gotten a reply from samsung about the free win 7.

Also, seem that mine doesn't have the number on the right bottom corner also.. kinda miss it though...
The previous one that I had, had the number. I returned it just because the free thing didn't kick in when I got it. And when I got this new one, it was $200 less than before.

 

Yeah, the LED color doesn't mean anything now
I'm happy with the laptop and I payed 1000$ before taxes, which I think it's fair

And I get a pretty good battery life of over 4hours when taking notes in class with light web-browsing, which is good enough for me.

Also, can't wait till SSD prices drop, since the HDD is the bottleneck for the apps that I run. Hopefully by next fall they will be affordable in larger capacity, cause I don't feel right paying 320$ on a 128GB drive

 

Mine does have the model number on the bottom right corner.

 

It took me 2 months to figure this out.
But I just discovered the best way to scroll up and down on the q320!

So up till now, ive been just sliding my finger up and down at the farthest right of the touchpad. But it wouldn't work 100% of the time, and was very finicky.
Also, even when i slide from the top to the bottom of the touchpad, I barely scrolled up or down and I would constantly have to slide down or up on the pad to get to the bottom or top.

Well! I just noticed that if you place your finger at the far right and slide your finger towards the center of the screen while makin a clockwise or counterclockwise motion with your finger, you will be able to easily scroll up and down really fast! Plus you can just go clockwise or counterclockwise continuously to reach the top or bottom of the page without ever having to let go!