Evesham Quest Roma T37 - My Review

Evesham Quest Roma T37

I’ve only had the laptop about 40minutes, so this is a first impression as to what I think of it ! My last laptop was an Acer Travelmate 244LM (Celeron .26Ghz), so I will be comparing to that.


Looks.
The case is nice looking, slim and neatly trimmed. The keyboard layout is a little square but is smart in appearance. It’s not the flashiest looking laptop, but it’s defiantly not the ugliest.


Build Quality.
The build quality seems to be good. The case feels sturdy and everything feels quite solid. The screen hinges are quite tight, but not enough to cause any worry. The black finish is not quite smooth, but feels nice. The only problem I could see is it picks up finger marks.


Screen.
The screen is a 15.4” ‘X-Bright’ widescreen TFT.
Running @ 1280 x 800 the image quality is excellent, very clear with vibrant colours. I can’t see any dead pixels and have test using ‘Dead Pixel Buddy’. As this is an X-Bright screen it is very glossy and looks great ! The screen is a massive improvement on my old Acer.


Keyboard & Trackpad.
The keyboard is nice, all the usual buttons are there in an easy to find layout. The feels of the keyboard is slightly ‘clicky’ not as smooth as a desktop pc keyboard, but as nice as the Acer. The trackpad is located directly below the keyboard, which could cause users with big hands a few problems. For me it’s not an issue.


Performance.
I’ve not had too much time to test the performance, but it feels a lot quicker than my old Acer. Windows loads fast and is very responsive. 3Dmark 2003 set at default setting returned a result of 5732. Whilst it was running the picture quality was excellent, very smooth and clear.

In normal use the laptop is silent, this is a bonus as the Acer was VERY noisy. When running 3DMark the fan revved up but was still quieter than the Acer.

Sound is quite loud for a laptop, a lot louder than the Acer, I would be happy watching a DVD at this sound level.

The Wireless detected and connected to my network without any problems, performance and distance seem to be as good as the Acer with a Belkin 54G PCMCIA Card.


Specification.

AMD Turion 64 Mobile Technology MT-37
Microsoft® Windows® XP Home Edition
512MB DDR RAM
80GB Hard Drive
128MB ATI Mobility Radeon X700
15.4" Widescreen TFT display (1280 x 800)
Built in Wireless LAN and Bluetooth
DVD/CD-RW/ Dual Layer DVD-RW drive
10/100 LAN & Modem v92 56k
Built in audio & speakers
4x USB2.0, VGA, PCMCIA Type II x 1
Dimensions 355mm x 255mm x 30mm
Weight 2.8kg


I purchased the Quest Roma with and additional 512MB Ram and extended the warranty to 2 years onsite.


Overall I’m pleased with the laptop. For the money it seems to be a good spec, well built and nicely presented.

Any questions please ask.

 

Thank u very much for this quick look. I'm in "serious" trouble in choosing the most suitable laptop, deciding between Quest Roma T37 and Acer 5024WLMi. Firstly I bought the Acer which got 100 GB and 1024 mb ram but in day after they changed the specifications to only 80GB and 512mb ram with the same price. Therefore, I cancelled the order being quite angry because it was definitely a good offer.

Back to Quest Roma. Do you think that the processor is significantly faster than for example the Turion ML-28 with 512 cache? Are there any other disadvantages to take in account with this / your laptop apart from the long-term order taking about 14 days? And, lastly, do you think that there will be a significant improvement if I will buy 60GB HDD with 7200rpm compared to 80GB 5400rpm? The 1024mb ram is a good choice indeed. In other words, I have no experience with Evesham services generally.
For example, on their website there is something strange with warranty. Don't really know what is OSM and RTB and why there is 1yr OSM with 2yr RTB adding 25 pounds and 2yr OSM with 1yr RTB costing 136 pounds. Don't u know what does it mean?
Really dont know if I can trust them - 1000 pounds is quite much money...


Thank you for your help very much.
Jan.

 

The Quest Roma has a Turion MT processor, which uses less power and therefore gives you longer battery life. In terms of performance, the Quest Roma has a 2.0 Ghz AMD Turion MT 37 processor with 1MB L2 Cache which is 400Mhz quicker than and has a cache twice the size of the ML 28.
The difference between a 60GB 7200 rpm and a 80GB 5400 rpm hard drive in terms of speed is noticable, but remember that it is indeed 20GB smaller. If you are someone who loves benchmarks and thinks that a PCMark05 result of 2500 is so much better than a result of 2450, go for the 60GB HDD.
OSM is On Site, whcih means that they will send a technicial over to your house and fix your machine (the technician might have a replacement laptop for you!).
RTB means Return to Base i.e. you have to bring the system back to their HQ.
Evesham's OSM service is great. It is usually fast and effective. However, if you purchase your machine and change your mind, don't expect them to give your money anytime soon.

 

Thank you very much for that. I fortunatelly found some other opiniouns from people who bought a laptop from Evesham and got a problem and how they solved it. I will buy the 80gb 5400rpm if there is no significant differences. Thank you very much for your time. Btw, do you think that it is possible to get the laptop for example tomorrow if i will go to evesham or their other shop tomorrow - or I will have to wait as well as if i will order it through the internet? I really need it for my uni study...

Thx,
Jan.

 

Hi Tommy.

From your and other recommendations I bought the laptop purchaching 1 gb ram and silver warranty. I love playing games on it (the lcd is very good) but compairing with your results, I got only 562x score in 3dMark03 (I tried it for many times). I installed the newest ATI driver 5.9 mobility, defragmented the hard-drive, etc., but it is still quite low. Somebody else wrote something about 5800 which is really a good score. Don't u know where can be the mistake (if exists)?

Moreover, only one thing i don't like on this laptop i the keyboad. After 2 weeks of using it 1 key (front arrow) has dropped out and I don't know if it is a good reason to call Evesham to solve it. The key is, however, working, just the cover slip does not hold here (i mean the key itself).

Other difficulty I experienced is, that in playing online game (swat 4) the system sometimes falls (blue death or drivers error). Reinstalling graphic drivers, I hope, solved it (did not have much time to test it).

What I also don't like is the missing ps/2 connector. I have about 5 keyboards at home and i cannot plug them in! Therefore, I will have to buy an usb to ps2 convertor or an usb keyboard but its a pity anyway.

Did u measure the battery life? I think it should be better. Acer's ML-37 Ferrari has +10w consumption but the battery life is nearly +1 hour more. The battery life is just enough for a film I usually watch in the train (2h 15min when u disable wireless and bluetooth etc.). I think it should be really better but because I use it as desktop replacement, I'm not so demanding in this area.

And the last thing, I'm not sure if the wireless network card is working. Windows show that it cannot join me to our home network (LAN is working) even if another computer with similar settings have no problems. In further testing it showed some difficulties in drivers. I will have to spend some time on it to solve it as well.

All things considered, I still do not regret what I chose and otherwise I love this laptop. I'm playing games, work on it, watching films, listening to music (with my external sound card and speakers) and it's really ok. UT2004 for High settings on 1280*800 looks much greater than on my CRT with GF6600GT.

Good luck!

 

Is this company only avaiable to a certain region? I am trying to search for a store that sells this laptop in the U.S. but I can't find any. If it's available in the U.S., can someone please give me a dependable site to order the laptop from? Thanks

 

Order it from www.evesham.co.uk, they deliver it everywhere in UK. Don't worry if the store is not in your city and the delievery is much faster than claimed 14 days (i got it in 7 days exactly).
Also, don't forget to upgrade the operation memory and buy the silver warranty, otherwise u will pay for delivery to the Evesham workshop when things will go wrong even if it is not your mistake...

 

I bought one of these with a gig of RAM (after trying to buy an Aspire 5024Wlmi with a gig of RAM just as they made the spec inferior grr...) and received it 14 days later, I ordered on a Friday night so I'm not very bothered about that.

I am very satisfied with the performance, I can run all my games at the native 1280x800 resolution if they support it with all details turned up except AA which isnt really needed at this res anyway (it even manages to get HL2 Lost Coast running quite smoothly at this level!). The display is very bright and crisp, I was worried about getting dead pixels but there are none!

What I would recommend is getting the latest Mobility Catalysts and then turning Catalyst AI to high, it improves performance very well for me (approx 10fps more in Doom 3 at High Quality). I'm using the Omega drivers, but If you get these you have to set the Powerplay settings to Optimal Performance all the time otherwise the laptop will crash when running off the battery, I have informed Omega of this.

The only annoyances are the position of the CTRL key (I keep hitting Fn!), it is really difficult to crouch in a game when using CTRL for crouch and WSAD for movement for example, and the fact the graphics chip's memory clock is underclocked by 50Mhz, but performance is still good. I'm not going to void the warranty by putting it back to stock speeds though, especially as it runs good already.

To summarise it is an excellent balance between price, performance and portability.

 

Hi,

I'm considering buying this laptop, and I just have a few questions:

Sound: Whats the sound like on this machine?

Portability: Anyone tried carrying it around?

Durability: Tommy said about build quality, but do you get them impression it could stand up to a normal amount of bumping around in a bag?

Thanks!

 

it would be best if the title was renamed "MSI 1029 (aka Evesham Quest Roma T37)"

This is an MSI 1029, which many OEMs like Evesham, Voodoo, ibuypower, etc, simply relabel and resell it under their name. People in the US interested in the model simply need to look up the MSI 1029. Since this is a popular model and many would be interested in this review, I strongly urge that the title be renamed so it can attract a wider audience as well as showing them where to go since Evesham seems to be purely european.

 

Sound is really good from this machine. The volume goes quite loud on the default speakers and it doesn't sound tinny at all. The sound solution by default is the tried and tested Realtek AC97.

The notebook is pretty light actually. I haven't bothered weighing it exactly, but I'd say it definitely isn't as light as an ultra-portable, but also definitely not as heavy or bulky as a desktop replacement.

I'm being pretty careful with it so I can't really say much about durability but I dropped it about 25cm off the ground (by accident!) while it was in a case and it was just fine. The build quality is fine...

Like I said before this is an extremely well balanced machine between price, performance and portability.

 

Did you ever sort out our wireless network problem. I have got an Evesha Quest Roma T37 and am about to throw it out of the window! I can't get my built in wifi to work at all. I just keeps saying it is not connected and refuses to find either of the two wifi networks in my building

I am emailing evesham support to try and get help but so far no solution.

I really regret buying this laptop. It is slower than I hoped it would be and the system standby only works 50% of the time.

I have tried getting Evesham to help out but they really aren't that useful. Mostly I just get the usual "it must be the software you're using" excuse. I really wouldn't recommend this laptop to anyone. It is remarkably disappointing.

 

The wi-fi is the last problem I didn't solve. The falling system and not-working Standby or Hibernation was caused by old graphic drivers installed originally from Evesham. The new 5.11 and 5.12 catalyst drivers work very well and I can't remember any system fall since installed them. On the other hand, I strongly recommend to buy an external keyboard, mouse, sound card and speakers - the bult-it features are poor, that's true. But it is not expensive to buy it and working on it is then much more comfortable. The other components such as Hard drive and operation memory are from prestigious companies.

So this week I'm trying to solve the wi-fi card problem - it cannot find the network so it can't connect to it even there is no WEP or passwords to go through and on other desktop PCs the wi-fi works fine. What I'm gonna do is to find through diagnostic programs what kind of wi-fi it is and find newer drivers or even software from that company to install the network - the windows drivers are crappy anyway. So, I will let u know how the things are going.

Otherwise the laptop is wonderful and I don't regret it at all - sorry, but in this point I not agree with u - the LCD is so nice, the construction is solved really well - I mean cooling system and how quiet it is, how nice it looks, how powerful it is, etc.

Thx 4 yr time, see ya soon.
Jan

 

See the row of 5 lights to the lower right of the chassis? Is the top one lit? If not push the wi-fi button (above the keyboard to the very right, same row as power). I think you've forgotten to push the wireless button

Wi-fi works fine on here, after some detective work I even managed to find 64-bit drivers for it on www.planetamd64.com

In device manager it is listed as a CP54G3 or something but it is actually based on the Inprocomm IPN2220 chipset.

 

Oh thanks God, yeah, it was only necessary to press that stupid button on the laptop to activate Wi-fi as well as Bluetooth (just two buttons on the keyboard on the top side, i didn't know what is it for before, now I know).

Thank u very much 4 yr help, man. It's a pity that because of that I bought another USB wi-fi adapter and didn't know about it for half a year!

Btw, the HDD in there is from Fujitsu (80gb, 5400rpm). During half a year of using, playing games and working, it stopped working for 2 times - i lost all the data and the hdd had to be replaced. In the second time, they delivered the laptop "repaired". I turned it on and heard very very strange noise somewhere inside it. It was a noise coming from inside somewhere where the air was supposed to go out of it and it was clicking every 4 seconds. I touched the laptop from back side and it was so hot that it was not possible to leave my finger anywhere on the back side!!!
Because I was angry that the laptop behaves strage from the HW point of view and I didn't want to lose it again for another repair, I opened that by myself. And do u know what I found? THERE WAS A SCREW IN THE FAN!!!!! I used some good equipment to put it away and it started working after plugging in the electricity. ufffff! I know we should not do that, but what kind of "expert" engineer did it? They were testing it, so how something like this may happen?

To be honest, I think that the design of this MSI 1029 prototype was not used by MSI because it's not working well. For example, although the HDD is separated from the rest of the components, its standing alone in a small box without additional (at least passive) cooling! Check yr temperatures after gaming - the processor has about 30-33 C, which is right but the HDD has 45-50!!! So I know understand why it stopped working.

Anyway, I love this laptop. It's working fine now and I have no other difficulty, nothing annoying.

One person here was saying that it's slow. It is - when u obtain it with so much ****py software like their useless "antivirus", Bulldog etc. Just remove it! Use Register Cleaner or whatever and remove it from the startup list. Make it clean and it will be smooth without any lags or low speed. And enjoy it, its a very good laptop!