» Friends have been looking for a new laptop to replace their ancient Dell. Told them I saw a Core i5 15.6-inch Gateway on sale at Fry's for ~$400. Price sounds too good to be true, no? 4-gigs of RAM.
They drove to the store, but while there, fell in love with the Lenovos, and ended up buying a 17-inch G770.
Beautiful machine. All black. 1600x900 default resolution. Wide-screen format. (Makes my home page design look sharp.)
2nd generation Intel Core i5-2410 processor. 32-nanometer lithography. Supports 8-GB memory (max). $700.
Still lots of 1st generation i5's out there. Not much of a price drop, either. So you might as well look for a second-gen puppy. Tho there's not a huge performance difference between 1st & 2nd generation CPUs, so if you can find a deal, grab it. Here's a cool Core i5 video.
With consumer confidence at a 2-year low, I'd expect more sales forthcoming. (My buddy Apex is a wizard at finding bargains.)
All Intel 2nd-gen Core i5's sport a 4-number model/label that starts with the number 2. E.g. » i5-2410 = 2nd gen, while i5-480 = 1st.
Regarding Intel chipsets, the HM55 supports the 1st-gen CPUs, while the HM65 supports 2nd-gen. That's another way you can distinguish.
Anyway, I offered to set it up for them. =) The #1 biggest problem I had (by far) .. was a tiny switch on the front .. that enables/disables Wireless.
Never saw one of those before. Very small. Easy to over-look. The suker absolutely would NOT see the wireless router (.. sitting 10 feet away, in the same room).
A troubleshooting wizard finally suggested checking the "wireless switch position". "Say what? What switch?" To the right enables the switch. Unfortunately, the default position seems to be left.
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After I had dialed everything in, we started hearing stuttering during audio playback (using multiple/different audio files and different programs. Even DVDs.) The stuttering lasts only a half-sec or so .. with a minute between stutters, but it's still rather annoying [ .. especially when playing Elvis' Hound Dog =) ].
Googled the audio stuttering problem for Windows7 and it seems quite common. As per a suggestion I read there, I tweaked the laptop's power settings (system tray icon) from EnergyStar compliant to 'Performance' .. and the stuttering seems to have quit. (The first thing I tried.)
Uh, if EnergyStar compliance means you cant decode an MP3 or *.wma file without intermittent stuttering .. what good is it? I mean, this is a dual-core processor.
When using Performance mode, the screen is very bright. (Heck, I had a tan by the time I finished installing all the Windows updates.)
I set up Big Al's Lenovo i3 laptop several months ago .. so I'm familiar with the brand. I like them. Very much. Used to think that IBM made Lenovos, but Magoo says that aint so. Says they sold that part of the company to Lenovo (a Chinese company).
Lenovo also makes ThinkPads (« even more gorgeous). I've always found myself lusting after ThinkPads (.. especially in the coffee shop).
I called Big Al to see if he could reproduce the audio stutterering problem. Think he might be down in Cuba .. visiting his dad. ■
For more along these lines, here's a Google search preconfigured for the query » lenovo laptop 17-inch intel core i5
