RE: MSI Announces Gaming Notebook for Under $800

3vi1 — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:10:50 GMT

The first thing I do when I get a new laptop at work is pull off the stickers and use a little bit of cleaner to get rid of all that sticky residue. Then, I apply a giant thinkGeek "Go away or I will replace you with a tiny shell script" sticker on it. I know - I make no sense.

You've actually convinced me that maybe it's not so ugly.

Coincidentally, my wife's laptop blew part of it's video yesterday: Only VGA graphics work; when you try to set any other video mode the screen goes black. So basically, it looked like it was booting fine but you would get a black screen where the login prompt should be - clicking/typing blind showed (via hard-drive activity/sound) that I could actually login but that the screen stayed black. I reloaded the video drivers to no avail, then tried my trusty Knoppix CD - which went to a black as soon as KDE set the video mode.

Had I never tried Knoppix on her machine, I may have investigated further. But, I know the CD worked fine on her hardware before, so that's conclusive proof of hardware issues. This is why everyone should download and try a Knoppix CD: possible hours of troubleshooting were reduced to simply booting the CD.

While trying to figure out what this might cost me, I stumbled upon several pages that make this appear to be systemic with HP ZD8000's: http://www.fixya.com/support/t245922-hp_pavilion_zd8000_pc_notebook_problem

Since it will be expensive to fix, and the laptop is getting long in the tooth, and is bound to have its rather expensive battery die any day, and has eaten three ac adapters at $60-90 a pop (the cheaper ones last a significantly shorter amount of time), I decided it was time to upgrade. She's always wanted something more portable than that monster 17" HP anyway.

I compared the MSI system to a few others, and narrowed it down to either this one or an Asus system. I really like Asus, but the specs on the MSI system were a tiny bit better, so I bought this very system.

Maybe I'll post something next weekend in the consumer reviews section, if it shows up in time.

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RE: MSI Announces Gaming Notebook for Under $800