Vr705

Anyone have an opinion on this? Looks like a decent laptop for the money ($650 from newegg). I like that it has slightly higher than average resolution (1440x900) for its price range. It says it has a subwoofer, so I'm curious about how it sounds.

 

I have one myself but bought it through ebay as a barebone. I paid $325 which is significantly less than what newegg is selling it for. As far as the sound, it is very crisp but I don't know about it having a subwoofer lol...

 

Ordered it from newegg yesterday morning and it just got here. Super fast shipping.

Haven't used it much yet, other than disabling all the crap in vista that I don't want. Fairly painless. I had an HP that I returned a week ago, and that was way worse. This installation was pretty bare, for vista. I have a 7200 rpm drive that I'm gonna install XP on, though, so I'm not really sure why I'm wasting time cleaning up vista.

Mine does have a "subwoofer", aka a third speaker on the bottom. Not sure if it's actually any different than the two on top.

 

Successfully installed WinXP.

I had an original, pre-SP1, XP disc. I used nlite to slipstream the SATA driver from the chipset drivers here ( http://download2.msi.com/files/downloads/dvr_exe/vr705_chipset_xp32_nb.zip). When the XP setup began, I got a pci.sys error ( http://www.techspot.com/vb/post290234-19.html), which had me a little nervous. Using nlite, I added SP1 to the XP disc and everything worked fine after that. Very stoked.

 

Had a little difficulty installing the video drivers. I installed all the other XP drivers from here ( http://www.msi.com/index.php?func=downloaddetail&type=driver&maincat_no=135&prod_no=1700) without any problems, but the "VGA Drivers" caused an error when I'd restart and I'd have to be at some low resolution with like 8-bit color until I uninstalled the driver or disabled the display adapter in Device Manager. I finally found the correct one (or one that works) from the Nvidia site here - http://www.nvidia.com/object/geforce_notebook_winxp_179.48_beta.html.

Another thing to watch out for -- when I replaced the hard drive, I tightened it down too much, and the left mouse button, which is directly above it, wouldn't click. I loosened one of the screws slightly and the button works fine now. Before I realized the hard drive swap was the culprit, I was pissed that I was going to have to send it back for a replacement.