Zapages said:
Awesome man. Congratulations!!! How does it feel owning one of them... I was definitely considering buying one.
Thank you for taking the time to answer.
I am thinking of adding the Ultimate 64 bit, so it uses the whole 4 gigs of ram and 9 cell battery so hopefully I am able to get 4 hours out of it max.
The major thing is the price, its going to cost 1800 dollars in all with above to stated. Plus the price of laptops fall over the years just like cars. Considering all that, I'm very indecisive about it and wary about the whole thing.
As for the payment methods??? Does GenTech some type of 24 months down plan like most larger stores? That's is one of my main concerns...
How's the screen brightness and the battery life? Also do you get 4 hours of life with the 9 cell battery by lowing everything up like the brightness and all, which makes everything hard to see or my having the brightness high and being able to see everything... Is brightness manually adjustable like with the Lenovos? Most importantly is it sturdy and feels something that can last you a long time like 4 - 5 years or so.
Thank you.
The laptop feels solid and well built and it's kinda cool that it has a numerical keypad where as most laptops don't include those. I'm still setting things up as it just arrived Friday but I didn't have time to really do anything with it till yesterday.
Let me preface with that I was not in a position where I was ready to buy a new laptop. Mine was solid and going strong. It was only 2 years and 3 months old when it just died suddenly. No problems until it just stopped. So I was sort of forced into buying a new laptop and I did it really fast where as I'm the type of person who likes to well research a purchase if it's going to be something that either costs a lot or should last a long time. I ended up doing 5 hours of solid research the same day it died and this is what I ended up with.
First off, let me get some stuff out of the way that I'm not keen on, but keep in mind I was sort of pushed into this situation rather than being ready to upgrade. The keyboard layout is throwing me right now. It's not that the keys feel weird or anything as I can type fine, but I just have some nuances that I'm not used to. It used to be I had Fn left arrow and right arrow for sound volume, and Fn up arrow and down arrow for brightness. This keyboard has that functionality mapped to the F# keys at top and instead have mapped player controls to the arrows. Another thing was since I didn't have the numerical keypad, my page up and page down were near my arrow keys which allowed me to easily browse with arrows and the pg up/down keys without looking. I also had a directional pad in between the two touchpad buttons that I also used to navigate which is now replaced with a finger scanner. I'm also fighting with Vista as I'm coming from XP Pro. I decided to give Vista a try to see how I would like it and will give it a full week or two of usage once everything is setup to see if I want to stick with that or go back to XP Pro. Right now I'm leaning toward XP since I'm fighting with the OS so much but I'm still setting stuff up. I also miss my slot loading drive which is now a tray that pops out. Anyways, that's all the little quirks that are annoying me right now that are probably just things I have to get used to.
So with that out of the way, I like the finger scanner. It's gimmicky but pretty cool and works as long as you move your finger slowly. You can use it to log in to your PC or even to sign in info that's encrypted like passwords, or even CC info. I hear since its all encrypted that if your laptop is stolen, that info won't be compromised. The touchpad has all sorts of controls that you can use if you switch it to media mode and it's backlit. I haven't figured out how to use these yet but it seems pretty cool from the pictures I saw. I also like how I have a full numerical keypad which you would normally have to hit the Fn key to use on my old laptop.
The screen is clear and a lot brighter than my old laptop. One cool thing is there is a light sensor which will auto adjust the brightness of the screen depending on how much light is in the area you're in. So naturally if you're in a dark room, you'd want to lower the brightness. It seems to work pretty well so far and a cool unexpected feature that I didn't expect.
I'm glad this laptop has an eSATA port on it as I had to pop out my old laptop HDD to copy the data off it, and having an eSATA port has made the transition a lot faster. My old laptop had some good speed management that would let me clock the CPU on the fly so I could lower it when I wasn't doing much or when I wanted to conserve on battery life. I haven't really discovered how power management works here via the Asus software or Vista. Although, one of the reasons I would lower the cpu speed was to make it not run as hot but even though this cpu is faster, the laptop as a whole hasn't felt too hot to hold on my lap. In fact now that I'm feeling for it, only one corner of the laptop gets sorta warm which is pretty impressive from previous laptops I've owned.
One quirk that I just remembered is I don't like how the indicators for like volume, brightness, wireless, etc, pop up dead center of the screen and are fairly graphical and big. I miss having those things at the bottom of my scren and more in a meter form. It was nice when you were watching say a video and wanted to adjust the brightness or volume, because it wouldn't interfere with what you were watching. Now it covers it up.
From everything I've heard is to stay away from Vista 64 bit because of compatibility issues. You're much better staying with the 32 bit version of Vista. I'm not sure how long the battery life will last as I haven't tried just running on battery too long, but I've read it's about 2 hours and 38 min on the 6 cell. I only got the 6 cell for now to see how I could handle it. My old laptop got about 3 hours when I turned down the brightness and cpu speed. I didn't want to get the 9 cell right away cuz I was spending all this money suddenly but I was thinking of maybe getting it down the road. Be aware that the 9 cell sticks out of the back a little bit. Not much, but it's not flush either. From the pic I saw, it sticks out about maybe a half inch? Definitely less than an inch. So not too bad, but don't be caught off guard by it. Depending how badly you need it, I would think maybe you could try out the 6 cell battery and see how it works for you. You probably won't need to have the laptop on during the entire class, and also probably not for all your classes.
As for payment, I'm not sure what options they have. I pretty much just put it on my credit card and paid it in full. I'm sure they mention it on their website what they offer.
Sorry to ramble, but I hope that helps some rather than confuse you more. Also I'm willing to answer anything that I can. Just keep in mind that I just got it, and I'm not completely set up on it yet. Also I'm getting used to Vista too.
