panzercannon01 wrote:So who all got there's yet? and what do you think of it thus far?
Got mine yesterday, did a clean format and install of Windows 7. Reinstalled all the drivers and some of the applications. You need to have some of the Samsung applications in order to access certain features. You have to have "Fastboot" in order to change power settings. FYI in order to disable "Sleep on lid close" you have to open up the fastboot application and turn it off, then you can adjust all of the power settings. And you have to have "Easy Monitor Adjustment" or something like that for the function hot keys to work with screen brightness, volume, etc. You have to have the "Chargeable USB" program to activate that feature.
As a heads up, you cannot use the USB 3.0 ports as bootable media. They use a third party controller (Renesas) and are not recognized in BIOS as bootable. If you are installing from a USB drive, you have to use the 2.0 ports on the right side of the laptop. Also, make sure you download the LAN and/or Wireless drivers before performing a clean install as Windows 7 does not have drivers for the hardware on this laptop (if you were thinking you would just do a clean install and then download the drivers from the internet once you were booted up).
I wiped the recovery partition and forgot to save Cyberlink PowerDVD, if you do a clean format and install you will lose blu-ray playback through that application. I think I am going to contact Samsung to see if I can get another copy or at least a serial/product key in order to install it. I don't think Windows 7 has blu-ray playback natively in Media Player.
Otherwise, the laptop flies without all the bloatware. I have a 1st generation Core i5 model of this same laptop (RF510-S01) with some minor tweaks and day to day performance is pretty comparable. I haven't installed any games on this one yet, so I'm not sure if it will play them better or not. The Windows Experience Index is higher on every category except the hard drive, which is the same on both. Photoshop works great, smooth, no lag. Haven't had a chance to check out battery life, but I assume it is comparable to the other laptop I own. 3-4 hours doing normal stuff (browsing, email, etc.), 2ish hours playing games or watching movies. The build quality is nice, though I don't have much to compare it to. The keyboard doesn't flex, the keys feel nice. The touchpad is responsive and multitouch scrolling works fine. The finish on the lid is nicer than my other one, shows fingerprints less. I would have preferred bluetooth instead of Wimax, but not really a big deal. WI-DI is a nice addition, I'll probably pick up an adapter to try it out.
All in all, I'm pretty happy with this purchase. I can't tell it's a refurb, probably just an open box or return. I got it for less than my core i5 460M, nvidia 330M version that I just bought 6 months ago for $730.
