Received an x340

I received my x340 this past Friday. NewEgg now sells it for $799. I bought it from Excaliber for $899. I will try and put together a review.
Some oddities:
1. Several programs, system control center, and EasyFace crash in Vista.
This stinks because I was intrigued with using face recognition to log me on.

2. You can not register this laptop yet with MSI as they do not list the model number in the pulldowns on their US web-registration page. Their support hours are M-F only. There is a mention to extended hours, but you must have a registered laptop?!


First impressions
Not too slow, Windows Vista Experience : 3.4

Runs most basic applications just fine.

The hard drive is partitioned with a restore, C: for the OS and D:


Screen is nice, but has fairly tight viewing angles, No dead pixels

Battery life on full performance is about 2.4 hours with 4 cell battery.

Very light

Keyboard absoultely sucks. The keys are big but the keyboard is not level
there is a slight bump in the middle of the keyboard and the center keys FGHJVBN, have considerable flex when typing. Also the homing notches on the F and J keys are very smooth and difficult to find.

Wifi is an INTEL 5100. It is draft N capable but I was hoping for an Atheros

Have not played any movies yet.

So in all, is it worth $900? I will withold that answer until I see what MSI plans to do about their buggy utilities and crappy keyboard. The sad thing is MSI knew about the keyboard being so bad since CES and everyone gave them the benefit of the doubt saying the early machines at CES and reviwed in Europe were pre-production and likely to be much improved. Guess what they were not.

 

Hey, thanks for the review

Any pictures to go along with it also is nice.

Cata