Classic British Flight Sim

Ok to the gurus here, this is the laptop I just picked up this evening, with the specs it seems like a really good deal and just right for the missus and with Windows 7 64 bit I was smiling.

Future Shop: Computers: Laptops: Gateway NV Series 17.3" Intel Pentium T4300 2.1GHz Laptop (NV7401H) - Black

Got home and went looking for some info on it like a review etc and was very surprised to see no info at all on it, not even on Gateway's website. Being that is only came out Oct 22nd seeing no info on their website is making me very wary.

So before I take it back tomorrow for something else, is this something I should be concerned about, no place to get latest drivers for it etc, and their support line you have to pay per minute which also scares me in case you need them. You can't even call anyone their VRU directs you right back to their website.

I"ve sent them an email asking about this, waiting for their reply, thought I would ask here to see if anyone has any views and or advice.

Thanks

Sorry, I see the link for the puter I posted didn't seem to work so trying again

http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/prodde ... 288&catid=

I wouldn't be too paranoid about it. I've bought a few laptops over the last couple of years and have learnt a few things. The brand isn't too important as most of them are just cases containing standard components assembled in factories in Taiwan or China. Once you've compared the components spec against the price, the only other thing to look at is the support offered.

Laptops are very reliable nowadays and if one's got a fault it will show up pretty quickly so a one year return to base warranty should suffice. If phone support find they can't solve a problem easily they'll arrange to have it collected and sent to the insurance repairers who will likely just swap out a component to get it turned round asap. The chances of this happening are pretty slim and you'd be unlucky to have it happen.

Updating drivers isn't easy on laptops. Many drivers, particularly graphics cards, are written specifically for the laptop manufacturer and updates should only be downloaded from the manufacturer's website. But they don't often make updates available unless there's a reason. So it's best to stick with the original driver throughout the life of the laptop to avoid software problems. An example is that I have to run an older version of nHancer because the latest version requires a newer nVidia driver for my card which isn't available from Acer.

If you like the laptop and the price it's not a huge gamble to go with it. Probably the biggest risk is of the seller going out of business taking the support line with it.

Ian

EDIT: Remember that most problems can be sorted out by resorting to a restore to factory defaults. The original drive image is stored on a partition on the HDD and you should burn a bootable recovery disk(s) asap. This can be very easy on laptops because if you haven't upgraded any drivers or changed components then everything's the same as when it was new. Except Windows updates I've just done a restore on a two year old Toshiba with an original version of Vista. It took most of the day to install service packs one and two and all the subsequent updates but it's now as good as it was out of the box. Well, better actually

SB, many thanks for the info. I know I probably won't find a better deal with all those specs. The other thing I liked was it hardly any pre-loaded
garbage on it. Having said that I think I'll actually crack it out of the box today and take a closer look.

Thanks again, always get such good and sound advice here.