Series 3 11.6" with i3 - np300u1a - anyone else have one?

It's not necessary but it makes my networking life easier.

I'm not sure it'll cost that much, I'm looking at the new intel atoms that's coming out. Cedar trail platform is suppose to be fanless, matte screen, and the new ones are coming out some sort of SSD. price range should be 249 and up.

Example below with a 10'1" screen.
"http://www.gadgetreviewspecs.com/2011/10/asus-eee-pc-1025c-with-intel-cedar-trail-platform.html"

If won't lie you got me thinking... I might swap this unit out for another, perhaps it's defective. Cedar trail CPU will never match this i3, although the battery life is still grand. I'll do a pros and cons T-Chart, I might come back with another Np300U1A haha

 

I picked one up and am really liking it. I just completely disabled the Elan touchpad driver because it was just horrible. I turned off swipe navigation and I still kept getting thrown back and forth in my internet browser with accidental SINGLE FINGER swipes. That's really bad! And even with the updated driver, the delay between typing and moving the mouse was distractingly long. Plus, two-fingered scrolling was also very delayed.

Literally the only usable feature of the touchpad was the side scrolling, so I decided to give that up in exchange for less overall frustration.

Love the design (a few rough edges on the plastic though), love the weight, love the screen, love the responsiveness! Also, it seems to run very very cool and quiet. Overall it's an amazing value and I was really surprised that it came with a full Office installation. The 16 year old kid at Staples was trying to convince me that I couldn't send emails or type documents without buying a copy of Office from him.

 

I also picked one of these up last night. So far I'm liking it a lot and although it's smaller than my old Asus UL30a, it's much quicker and has the same resolution screen.

Also, apparently these work with the high capacity batteries from the NC310. They're 6600mah compared to the 4000mah we have stock.

 

Good news! I confirm that this Samsung NP300U1A laptop works with 8GB DDR3-1333 (PC3-10600) memory module:

Micro Center - Crucial 8GB DDR3-1333 (PC3-10600) CL9 SO-DIMM Laptop Memory Module 649528754684

I am sure on eBay you can find a cheaper one.

 

Picked one of these up for my daughter. Incredible device for $349.99.

How2do - a $499 RAM stick in a $350 notebook?

 

First of all, the price for this laptop is back to $699.99 in Staples and currently it is out of stock. Second, I did not say I bought this 8GB module (I agree it is not worth it right now, but could be done in a year or so). I personally use 32-bit system. So, I do not need 8GB RAM. I just checked the concept it will boot with 8GB RAM and 8GB will be recognized in the BIOS.

UPDATES: Upgraded my NP300U1A with
1. 256GB Samsung 830 SSD (7 mm).
2. Bigfoot Killer 1102 Wireless-N card.
3. 8GB memory module ($49.99 in MicroCenter).

 

you guys know where you can find a bigger battery for this laptop??

 

I picked up one for $350+tax. Just arrived today (free shipping, no Staples nearby). What I really wanted was a deal on the Dell Vostro V131, but this low price made for a quick buy.

Strange on the HDD, one person posted earlier saying it was a 7mm drive while the blog linked earlier said it was a normal 9mm drive.

I hope that after a few charge/discharge cycles and with a 100% charge instead of 80% and an SSD installed, I can get 4+ hours of web browsing. This gives me a bit of pause - why do I always end up with notebooks that have lousy battery? Oh yeah, because they're cheap and sexy!

Hope my wife isn't too mad. I'll probably have to offer up some of my older unused notebooks here for sale soon to placate her.

 

I also picked one up for $349. I think with an SSD it will be a nice netbook killer. I currently have a DM3T with the SU7300, Vertex 2 SSD and it gets 4+ hours of battery life so I'm hoping this isn't too far off. It is definitely a 7mm space for an HDD. I tried to install my Vertex 2 on it and it does not fit at all. Newegg had a sale on an Intel 320 series 160GB SSD and I picked that up for $245. I wish the 8GB memory sticks weren't so expensive not worth it right now. I'm hoping this will make a reliable part time school and traveling laptop.

 

Guess I'll put my spare 120GB Intel G2 in mine. Had a quick look so far, and I like what I see. Light weight, looks decent, lack of glossy surfaces (YES!), matte screen, touchpad feels good to me, keyboard is fine. I'm still concerned about the battery life. Oh yeah, mine has a bump just above the speaker grill, near but not right over one of the bottom screws. Hmmm...

 

Did you put 7mm or 9mm hard drive?

 

A 9.5mm hard drive will cause the palm rest to bulge. I had to take the casing off my drive to make it fit without causing problems.

 

Here is my new Samsung Series 3 11.6" notebook that I got from Staples in the recent hot deal.



My plan is to swap out the HDD with an SSD. In this case, an Intel X25-M G2 120GB I got a while back but never used.



Turns out there are EIGHT screws to be removed. I have highlighted them in red. The memory panel does not have to be removed, but you will want to remove the battery and SD card blank. You will also need to remove the two round rubber feet to expose two of the screws. They are just stuck on with double sided tape, so carefully pry them off.



Here is the bottom of the naked notebook. After the screws are removed, you have to CAREFULLY pry it apart. There are little tabs all around it spaced 1-2" apart. I started in the bottom corner near the Windows COA and worked my way around counter-clockwise. The VGA port juts out a bit, so you have to do that last. The rubber thing around the HDD was caught on a tab next to the screw hole (heatpipe points at it) causing a bulge. Sloppy assembly, Samsung!



The HDD is indeed 7mm. I guess a 9.5mm drive can fit if you don't use the rubber thing around it, and don't mind a slight bulge. I took out the four screws that hold on the plastic spacer on the Intel SSD, and the whole thing just came apart! The screws are then too long to hold the SSD together without the spacer. ?!?! Good thing the rubber thingy that surrounds the drive holds it together, so I just left the screws out.



Drive is installed, so all that's left is to reverse the procedure for the bottom, by first installing it at the VGA port and then going around the edge snapping it together. Then the screws go in, etc.



I mentioned earlier that mine has a slight bulge. It doesn't really come out in the pic, other than as a slight reflection (circled in red). It is as if something sharp jabbed it from the INside of the notebook.



Right now I'm reinstalling Windows off the restore disc that came with the notebook. Hopefully it has any and all software/drivers necessary.

Couple other thoughts...

I did end up setting the BIOS to use only 80% of the battery. I figure if I need extra juice (traveling or what not) I can easily remedy that situation.

The notebook DOES make noise. I guess it all comes down to what you are accustomed to. Compared to my Latitude 13 which is 100% silent, this is noisy. Compared to my Clevo gaming notebooks, this is pretty darn silent. The fan doesn't spin all the time, but when it does it is noticeable.

Anyone want to buy my old notebooks?

 

Zap, when you removed the plate from the SSD, did that make it small enough not to create a trackpad bulge? Or is it still there, even with the stripped down SSD?

 

Thanks for the images, zippyzap. To clarify, did you have to remove only the black plastic frame from the Intel SSD? What about the metal frame (which is disassembled in your image)?

 

No funny bulges. The Intel SSD is 7mm without the black plastic spacer. I was even able to use the rubber HDD holder that came with the original HDD. I'm guessing it is to hold it in place (HDD isn't screwed in to anything) and give a bit of noise/vibration reduction.

You're welcome.

Yes, removed just black plastic spacer as well as the screws. The aluminum cover was reassembled, but not screwed together. It was all held together by the black rubber thing that came with the notebook.

See this thread. It is a common problem with the Intel drives. The spacer makes it 9.5mm and without it 7mm. However, the screws ONLY work with the spacer, so without it the drive isn't held together. It shouldn't affect performance/reliability, unless you touch the bare PCB/chips and get a static shock.

I've got Windows reinstalled. The "recovery" disc that comes with it is just a standard Windows install disc, so all drivers and proprietary software has to be downloaded from Samsung.

For anyone else who bought this, does the Samsung Control Center seem kind of laggy to you? I didn't try it on the factory install before swapping out to the blank SSD. On this fresh install, it doesn't always detect Fn keys like the screen brightness control. When it does, it brings up the Control Center window, which is irritating. I want it to work w/o that popping up. Also, the WiFi enable/disable doesn't work via hot key.

Oh yeah, also the Microsoft Office that comes with it was preinstalled. I haven't tried it yet, but supposedly you can download the installer straight from Microsoft and use the product key that comes with the notebook (on slip of paper with the manuals).

 

An update on mine. I installed a new Intel G3 SSD drive and it works great. I was able to clone it with Acronis and then run the Intel toolbox to optimize it and it's much quicker. If anyone else is having issues with bluetooth and WIFI I have a fix. Mine and my buddies would randomly drop the connection to the BT mouse and upon further inspection I found most of Samsungs drivers out of date. The WIFI and BT are from 2006 or generic. So you will want to go to Intel's support page and update those, it fixes the random issues and installs it as a proper BT 3.0 device, not a generic BT device and also updates the WIFI drivers to current, my buddies was dropping his WIFI constantly and this fixed it. 2nd, if anyone else has a Bluray drive they can test a movie with, i'd like to hear what kind of quality you get. I'm not sure if it's my old BR program or what but BR play is somewhat choppy. That is the 3rd driver you will want to update but you have to get it from Samsung's page, the one on Intel's doesn't seem to work right. The graphics driver update didn't seem to have an affect on my poor playback quality.

 

I'm having an annoying issue. I disabled the wireless card and now I can't seem to be able to reinstall it. I d/l both drivers from samsung website the intel and the atheros but they dont work. All I see in device manager is a "network controller" and even trying to install the drivers manually won't do it.

any suggestions. I can't believe after 15 years of IT work I get stuck on something this simple

 

WIFI card is an Intel N 130 in mine, maybe that helps?

 

Interesting... I downloaded the Intel WiFi drivers from Samsung, but did not DL the Bluetooth drivers because they were 250MB and Windows seems to have its own. Haven't tried BT yet but WiFi seems to work fine.

 

If you get them directly from intel they are only 40MB, same with the WIFI, i'm not sure why Samsungs is such a big package. I got mine from Intel.

 

has anyone been able to put a better battery in their series 3?

 

Haven't tried, but my solution was to order a Dell Vostro V131 with claimed 9.5 hour battery. I know, not much of a solution.

 

Most [if not all] of the drivers there(samsung support) for this laptop are out of date. I think someone scrambled together files from older laptop models and called it a day.

However, all the drivers that come pre-installed on the laptop are current.

 

Most of the "important" drivers preinstalled on mine were old or non existent. The BT was using the Windows default, WIFI was old, chipset was at least 3 releases ago, as was the video card.

 

Can someone try streaming something from Netflix in HD? I"m a little dissappointed that with the HD3000 video adapter and the new sandy bridge it can't do it. Mine is fine on non HD but is jumpy on HD. I tried the new sliverlight 5 release candidate to see if that made a difference but it doesn't. it's' only using 30% of the CPU while trying to stream HD.

 

Perhaps someone can try this one:

Buy.com - New Laptop Battery for Samsung AA-PB0TC4B AA-PB0TC4L AA-PB0TC4M AA-PB0TC4R AA-PB0TC4T 7200mah

 

This is what you need to do:

1. Switch from the wireless network to wired (I have 1 GB wired network).
2. Use AC power and configure your laptop to maximize the performance on the AC power and minimize energy consumption on battery power.

With these settings I played The Nine Lives of Chloe King movie from the Netflix and it played in HD very smoothly.

 

never use window media player, it will make any video skip.
with VLC everything is smooth

 

I can stream Netflix HD fine with my "puny" (by today's standard) 3Mbps DSL service. I am very close to the CO, though, so I have a consistently high throughput, basically the full 3Mbps. However, I do it through the Netflix "channel" in Windows Media Center (you have to install it), not through a browser and the Netflix web site.

Using Windows Media Center I can also stream to the NP300 the 1080p HD content on our main desktop computer which I record from OTA TV through a Hauppauge TV Tuner Card, without any problem. My Wi-Fi Network is nothing extreme, a Netgear 802.11g AP WPA2 encrypted with a measured throughput computer-to-computer of around 24Mbps.

The bottleneck could be in your internet access or, as somebody suggested, in the power setting of the NP300. Make sure you use the "high performance" scheme and the power adapter. If you need to stream on battery power, edit the "advanced" settings of the power scheme you prefer (or better yet make a custom one) and make sure the "Maximum CPU state" is set at 100% even when on battery. I believe all the default power schemes always throttle down the CPU when on battery, even "High Performance."

Surprisingly, this little beast has turned into a tiny, mean, multimedia machine. It also drive perfectly my 42" LCD TV, which happens to have the exact same screen resolution as the NP300. Even if it is "only" 720p, HD content looks great when streamed from the NP300 on the big screen through the VGA port, even better via HDMI.

 

ok there is something odd. I have a 20GB healthy recovery partition that is empty. That makes no sense. can i delete it? I am cloning this disk to a smaller 160gb disk so i need to decide what to do.

 

I do believe while running the Windows initializer, known as the "Out-of-box experience" (OOBE), it by default formats your hard drive to include a sizable recovery partition. Not sure exactly how big, but that could be what's going on.

I'd try looking through the Samsung bloatware to see if there's any way to configure that partition. Otherwise, you could probably just delete it yourself.

 

I have read somewhere that it might be a linux partition, as a matter of fact doesn't even show a what file system is using. so i am waiting to delete until is more clear

 

I remember that. It asked if I wanted the drive to be all one letter (C), or two (C, D).

 

Hey guys, I'm looking to buy this laptop off of Ebay (used, sadly, but oh well). I was wondering if anyone has tried out Starcraft 2 on it? It doesn't have to play well, but I'd like to have a laptop that can at least play it. Thanks.

 

It'll probably play it, but not that well. The HD 3000 is fine actually. It would be the 1.3GHz CPU holding it back, if anything.

 

I did chose only one. Also the other partition has no letter assigned to it and i cant assign one as well from disk management.

 

Am just starting to use my Samsung Princeton 11.6" and find that the fan keeps coming quite frequently and is quite loud. (Used it from roughly 11pm through 2:30am last night and am guessing it was on during almost 70% of my usage).

I went into Samsung Control Center and turned the fan OFF - this turns the fan OFF temporarily but then restarts it few minutes later. CPU usage shows less than 30% usage on all cores. The behavior is the same irrespective of the option selected in Control Center or using the Fn+{key} combo. Also looked in BIOS for any options for fan control but didnt see any.

I was excited when I purchased this through Staples recently and hoped I could replace my recently purchased Acer AO722-BZ454 (w/ AMD C-60 processor). The Acer did most of the things I wanted (playback BluRay/1080p videos, remote in to work PC and usual websurfing etc) but this Samsung has some Intel-specific features the AMD processor in Acer does not offer (QuickSync, Bluetooth, ClearVideoHD, WiDi and 3D BluRay playback). The Acer's fan also comes on intermittently but not as much as with the Samsung last night. I understand per Zap's posts couple pages back (where he shows how to replace HDD with SSD in this netbook) that it is loud, but I am stumped as to why the Control Center or Fn+{Fan key} combo dont do much - its like the computer overrides these settings.

Hoping I can still hold on to the Samsung but after last night's usage experience wondering if I might need to return or atleast exchange it?

Thanks,
-Topper

 

I have seen SC2 running on the UX31 I5 CULV with HD 3000 graphics. It was surprisingly smooth. I think it will run on the I3.

 

Is it normal to have a high pitched noise with this computer? Not noticeable when the fans are spinning, but I find it distracting when the fans are off. Strangely, I can only hear it when facing the notebook, when I turn my head the sound disappears. Anyway, this is the last day I can exchange the notebook and I'd like to know if this is common. Your comments are appreciated.

 

Check the other Fn key options. Samsung used to offer a quiet mode. Also investigate the CPU usage (see the Processes page in Task Manager. Idle to light usage should have the CPU utilisation running at 0 to 5% and the fan running slowly. HWiNFO32 can provide additional insight into CPU speed and temperature.

I wonder if this is the infamous CPU whine, which is caused by capacitors vibrating when the CPU changes power states. I thought that the problem had been largely fixed but there may be production tolerances.

John

 

As much as I like this laptop I decided to get a Macbook Air instead.

Did anyone try putting an SSD in? If so how much battery life are you getting?

 

Crucial M4 128gb increases battery life from 3.0-3.25 to 4.25-4.5 hours with four bars of illumination and 4000 mAh battery. 6600 mAh battery runs 7 hours. Weight drops from 2.84 to 2.69 lbs with the 4000 mAh battery. I see little reason to buy a MacBook Air or Series 9, but to each his own.

 

should we mention the price difference? 3x more for the air?

 

Very different class of laptops. Samsung series 3 offers more value for money. In my opinion the Air is faster, has better battery life, build quality, screen, touchpad and keyboard.

Samsung series 9 is meant to compete with Macbook Air.

 

Phil and Sir, you are each right. You pay for the Series 3 a lot for a little, but you do get more. True of the Air too - plus the cool factor and a nicer touchpad and screen.

BTW Phil E4300, p9600, 64SSD, 4GB and WinPro. And considering how I started with a Kaypro II and my first ultra sub was a Toshiba T1000 the newbie monicker is humerous. And I must add I still use my Dell Latitude X1 every day. A great laptop never dies, it just fades away.

 

I'm interested in this laptop due to performance, small size and MATTE DISPLAY (omg!), but I'd like to know where you can get a larger battery for it. 3-3.5 hours won't make it through my chemistry class!

 

I dont want to crosslink but there is this guy on slickdeals that have bought an "unofficial" larger battery.

here is his post:

the AA-xxxx is part number for the battery replacement.

 

Both these batteries have been proven to be a perfect fit:

Buy.com - New Laptop Battery for Samsung AA-PB0TC4B AA-PB0TC4L AA-PB0TC4M AA-PB0TC4R AA-PB0TC4T 7200mah

New Laptop Battery For Samsung N310 7800Mah

 

This one is inexpensive. Anyone deal with this company before?