72 hours - or how long my Razer Blade 14 (2014) worked

edit - All clear, just needed a clean windows install. The install drivers were for the old razer blade 14.


Here's my thoughts for anyone still on the fence about picking up a blade 14, I've only had it 3 days and well, its not all pretty...

I purchased a "refurbished" unit from amazon for about 1850 (which is something to note, that does change how you should perceive my review). It was absolutely immaculate out of the package - no scratches/dents, looked brand new.

First boot up was great - setup was easy, installed a few games - tested them out, it was great. Love the trackpad, hate the buttons for the trackpad. Game performance was surprisingly solid, ran at various resolutions with only a few problems.

After 2 days of use the computer now hangs on a blank black screen on boot. It is on, because I can enable the windows speech option - and it tells me I am at the log in screen, despite being able to see nothing. I literally can do nothing with the laptop now. I have tried booting on AC, on battery - tried waiting 5/10/30 minutes in between boot attempts - still nothing.

I am pretty heartbroken. This is almost everything I want out of a laptop, I dont think I can go to the competitor after owning this machine.

Guess I'll have to wait another year and hope the next iteration isnt plagued with various issues.

 

Well...

You bought a refurb. It was probably returned for a reason, and whoever refurbished it here in the US (Razer? 3rd party?) didn't do their job.

Build quality on these is generally pretty good, although nowhere near Apple like IMHO. However, you are definitely an outlier.

 

i would just return it for a refund and try your luck with one of the refurbs on ebay. I picked one up and have had it a couple of weeks now. no issues. (maybe i just got lucky and got someones buyers remorse return)

 

I agree. I am in the minority.

My concern is the size of that minority though - aside from these forums, I keep finding more and more feedback from other owners that is negative.

I love this product, I really do - just wish it was more reliable (I am speaking not only for myself at this point)

 

I think the product overall is pretty reliable. I think with any laptop on these forums you will see a lot more negative posts than positive posts because the people without issues don't need help fixing anything...
Also a lot of the negative posts lately have been regarding the refurbs showing up on amazon and ebay. Nobody knows what happened to these notebooks and where they came from....

 

I love mine, no issues at all. I wish it was quieter under load, but that would be a Herculean task given the design and components. 100% satisfied.

 

Thats good to hear. I hope as many people as possible can enjoy this laptop. I dont think there is another one on the market today that beats it as a complete product.

 

I love mine as well, in fact I hadn't been on the forum for months as both of my Razer Blades have been 100%

I came back looking for info on the Razer Edge, and I agree with the guy who says that people tend to post problems, not happiness with the product.

 

I love mine especially for Under $1200. Only issue is with sleep that never worked as some others, fixed by making the laptop hibernate instead. So far amazingly happy.

 

UPDATE 8/8:

So last night after work - spent about 6 hours total getting the laptop to work again, this weekend I am going to use it all weekend - attempting sleep, hibernate, shut downs and restarts regularly.

But, before I fixed it, it got worse.

The problem was on start up - it would attempt to start windows, but the screen would go black and the computer would hang - so I thought "Let's check the bios and see if anything is strange"

This turned into the computer ONLY booting into the bios. Every time I'd shutdown, restart, or even attempt to exit the bios - It would go right back in.

I attempted to use the Razer USB restore (thanks to another forum member on here, he put the files up in a separate thread), but I received the error that the partition needed to restore was never set up. For some reason it wouldnt boot from the USB (I checked the usb on my desktop, and it worked). The good thing though, was that having the USB stick in the laptop stopped the computer from going to straight to the bios or black screen - but now it hung at the boot screen.

The fix was swapping the USB Restore with my USB DVD drive (while holding delete so the computer did not go past the boot screen) and doing a clean windows 8.1 install via CD.

A couple things I noticed once going clean:

There was no Killer software what so ever, which was present on my laptop prior - but unable to be deleted (which probably caused my wifi issues - despite me having the new a proper driver for intel installed). My laptop's download speeds also increased about 3 fold.

In the bottom right corner of the boot screen - there is a rotating sequence of one letter, followed by one number - after clean install, it has become microscopic in size, where it was quite large and readable prior (dont know if thats good or bad)

My gaming performance has increased by about 15-20% per game tested. Prior to clean install I was using the most current drivers via geforce experience, enabled beta drivers - seems to have helped a bit.

My fan noise is louder - I dont consider this bad, unless the temps have now gotten higher. I unfortunately didnt monitor temps before, and I will start to do so going forward.

Oh and I attempted to contact Razer Support for help last night - let me just say it was the single worst experience I have ever had with a "customer service" agent.

It was about 2 minutes of total conversation, with the agent sounding especially annoyed with me (I was very polite, didn't express frustration - simply asked if maybe there is something I am missing/he might know about the issue I am having). He said he would help me - found my Razer info, then asked "When did you buy this from the Razer Zone?". I replied "I purchased it from Amazon."

He immediately defaulted to "You need to return it through them" (Which if I was calling to return the product, I would completely understand)

I asked "Is there any trouble-shooting we can try?"

And then he sent me a link to a .pdf for restoring your razer. Which obviously wasnt going to work for me as the computer was hanging on a blank screen and I couldnt access any recovery partition.

I want to make this clear - I LOVE RAZER PRODUCTS. I have an orochi, naga epic, orbweaver stealth, onza, sabertooth and now a Blade - but there support/service is awful.

Sorry for the long story, hopefully I can keep this gorgeous laptop working - if anyone runs into any issues please contact me and maybe I can help!

 

Well there's the problem right there.. There is no Killer networking on a 2014 Blade 14, it's an Intel 7260..

Did they perchance put the 2013 image on a 2014 laptop?

 

Yea, that's what I am thinking - the company who refurbished the product restored the device using an older image.

So, I hope I am out of the issues and on to smooth gaming with the blade.

 

I believe someone uploaded an image of the 2014 USB Drive. I would just download that and reformat. The notebooks are very similar from a hardware standpoint but not identical.

 

I actually tried that, but for some reason the laptop would not take it,

Right now everything is fine though - I have a fresh install using the disks I had from my recent desktop build.

I am so happy I dont have give this baby up - It wrecked all other laptops for me.