MSI Reliability issues? battery life?

Hi, one of the notebooks I'm considering is the MSI 1029; it's the only turion notebook I know of which has a decent (x700) GPU. The fact that it has a bunch of aluminum in the case seems to be a point in its favor as well.

However, a friend of mine tells me that MSI notebooks tend to have pretty poor reliability, with components dying regularly.

I'd like to hear opinions on how the reliability (and build quality, I guess) of recent MSI notebooks compares with, say, HP.

Also, the nice 1029 review I found here says that battery life is only 2 hours doing light tasks. This seems really low! does anyone else have experiences to corroborate this? If so, are higher-capacity batteries purchasable?

Thanks much! There's a ton of good info on these forums. (^^)

 

I have a 1029. Build quality is good. As far as the components dying, that's hardly MSI's fault. They only make the barebones kit. The proc, memory, and HDD are made by other companies, just like any other notebook manufacturer.

That said, I can't difinitively say that the 1029 is a reliable notebook. I have had zero problems with mine. It runs very fast, and for the money I don't think I could have done better. It does run pretty hot in CPU intensive games (GPU and CPU at max), that may impact the life of the notebook, but I'm sure it would be long obsolete by then.

Battery life is just fine for me. In light use (wireless + web surfing) I get about 2.5 -3 hours. I was getting less, but I switched my wireless card to powersave mode and it helped quite a bit. Under max battery conditions, (wireless off, screen brightness down, HDD power management on max battery, max battery power settings) I got about 3.2-3.5 hors hours doing word processing. DVD playback was about 2h 40m with WinDVD 7 (Using power hungry USB 5.1 headphones).


I'd say that you can buy the MSI with confidence. It may not be the most user friendly PC, but if you have some PC knowledge you'll be able to handle its quirks well.

Hope that helps.

 

IT is actually a very reliable computer. However, battery life is one of it's weak points. I found that with an aggressive "breaking in" session of the battery (I believe there is a guide for it in this website) you can get a good 30 minutes more.

 

Thanks for the info; I have a much better idea of the battery life now. still seems a bit lower than the compaq v5000z, but it doeas have the x700 after all. I appreciate the comments on build quality & reliability as well. I've heard good things about rawpowerpc so if I go with the 1029 I'll probably get it from there.