The BEEBSTER 8887 Review!! - Page 3

One thing I really love about the 8886/7 series is the typing position. The keyboard is great... the benefits of a large size plus the flatness of a laptop keyboard (I prefer the flat keyboard keys to the desktop keyboard keys that are small at the top and big at the bottom). It is also nice because the placement of the touchpad means you don't accidently tap it with your palm while typing. On my school lappy it is a constant... you type, then your palm hits the touchpad and your cursor is spontaneously on the other side of the screen. That doesn't happen with the 8887. Also, as I've mentioned a dozen times before, the palm rests are smooth and typing couldn't get more comfortable. I type a LOT. I can say definitively that long spurts of typing or long spurts of gameplay won't hurt or cut off blood circulation, etc. :-)

I tried ripping another dvd at different settings... It finished in half the time it would have taken to watch the dvd, lol, so this beast can definitely handle any encoding job you through at it. When the HT enabled bios comes out, I'd like to see how much performance increases if programs are put out that utilize HT.

In response to questions, I used EasyDivX to rip the dvds... I had a few problems with the software last night, though. The first rip I did, it did full DVD quality... that was sweet, but after that I don't know what setting I'm missing, but it does half resolution. Those are the different settings I mentioned above. I ripped a 2 hour dvd at 320x240 in about 50 minutes. However, this software sometimes gets the audio out of sync (it happened once...). I just got a different ripping program to try, it's called RipItAll, and it looks pretty comprehensive and even has an audio resync program with it. I'll try ripping a dvd using that later. The only problem is that you have to copy the vob files to the hard drive first with RipItAll... EasyDivX didn't require that. More on that later!

Today I am taking the 8887 to my biology class to take notes on it. I will try and comment on all aspects of the experience :-) That includes carrying this through the snow and cold that's happening outside. The class is an hour long, and I've got the processor set to underclock to half. I don't imagine battery time to present any problem at all, and I'd like to see just how much battery power is left after an hour of pure word processing with no peripherals. I'll have screen brightness set to minimum (which is still plenty bright, lol). I just hope those little college desks will hold this laptop... :-)

The battery estimated through class to last about 2:10 consistently. I packed the 8887 into its standard case (the leathery one that costs like $6 to add on PCTorque). It fits nicely. I also packed into the outer pocket: an optical mouse, the power cable/converter, the remote, the splitter, a 6 ft lan cable, about 10 cds, the phone cable that came with it, and a coax cable. :-) No, I didn't need these to go to biology... I wanted to pack as much as I had or that I'd ever want or need. It fit quite well. I had on my big coat, my regular school backpack, and my sager carry case. It was heavier than the usual dell-sized laptop, but it honestly wasn't a huge difference over the long run. I walked down 5 flights of stairs, to the bio building (about the length of a football field away... a lil more), and then up 2 flights of stairs. I switched it from my left shoulder to my right shoulder about halfway there. It wasn't that bad, but it did start to hurt since the weight was on one shoulder. In bio, the laptop barely fit on the desk, so I found a left-handed desk in there that had a slightly bigger top. It fit nicely :-) All of my friends were like "whoa!" when they saw it :-) I was able to type comfortably during the whole class even though it was on a left-handed desk :-) The only problem I had was the screen is so big I had to sit up to look over it and see the projector with the powerpoint notes on it, lol. This wouldn't have happened in a right-handed desk, and I'm sure I can fit it on one, I just didn't stop to try. I believe I will take it with me for notes from now on because it is much faster to type than it is to write. Plus, it's fun to have my computer with me :-) The battery took me through the 50 minutes of class and reported that there was about 1:20 or so left. I left there, brought it home, and now have it on my external optical light-up mouse and my external speakers and it's on the lan. It's been on for about 20 minutes, says there's an hour or so left on the battery. So, all in all, I'm rating the battery time pretty highly considering what's in here, lol. I don't expect to watch a long movie on battery, but I can definitely see lots of work getting done. I may try watching a DivX movie that I rip from a dvd... I'll watch it on the hard drive and see if that improves battery time at all. I'll also see if that affects the speed changes in the video that happened when the processor underclocked. That'll help narrow the problem down a little.

As far as the question about wireless, I have no wireless card, so that isn't a factor in battery times. I will experiment with ways to increase battery life. :-)

Glad to hear you're following the review with interest! I apologize that I've not had time to post much otherwise on the forums. I'll definitely check out your question on the thread you mentioned and respond as best as I can.

Yale is correct about the underclocking. Actually, I've had some trouble with it... I guess I'm just gimp with underclocking because I had the same trouble on the 8886 (it may just be my version of sandra, now that I think about it...). Here's the latest:

The low battery light functioned correctly during this run down of it. It functioned perfectly, in fact. As far as the charge time, it took about 2.5 hours to fully charge the battery from a fully dead state while the laptop was OFF. While on, it would prolly take a full day or more, so keep that in mind if you are planning to run on battery power. All laptops have a big charge time while the computer is on... but this is especially long because 1) it is a 12 cell battery as opposed to an 8 cell battery and 2) the laptop itself sucks a lot more juice from the ac adaptor than do other laptops.

I set the power options to portable/laptop and played a dvd for a while... the dvd played smoothly as it would on ac power. I'm going to go through each setting and run sisoft to see what exactly happens with the processor on each. While plugged in, the multimedia benchmark results are 12184/15103. Now, I will go to battery power and run through each power scheme.

On A/C: 12184/15103
Home/Office desk: 12191/15117
Portable/Laptop: 12182/15106
Presentation: 12185/15099
Always On: 12189/15116
Minimal Power Management: 12189/15128
Max Battery: 12283/15120

Ok... Well, obviously I'm getting some inconsistent results. The processor apparently didn't underclock? The weird thing is, I can watch the dvd get smooth when I change the power setting from max battery to anything but max battery... As soon as I hit apply, the video gets smooth. I'm confused at this point. I'm going to restart the computer and see what the bios setting is...

The setting was on high power saving, which is supposed to be the 50% underclock setting... I noticed, though, that I didn't uncheck "PnP OS" (plug and play os), which I had to uncheck on the 8886. I'm going to try sandra now that I've unchecked that.

Always on: 12183/15111
Max battery: 12192/15099

Again, I'm absolutely stumped. This same thing happened with me with the 8886... I couldn't get it to underclock and then it finally did when I disabled pnpos in the bios... But here, the scores are not changing. I played a dvd with FRAPS open so it would display the framerate... During all of the power schemes except Presentation and Max Battery, the dvd played smoothly and at the NTSC fps of 25. During both presentation and max battery, the fps dropped to 19, and they went up and down from 18 to 21... I don't know why. I just checked, and the same thing happens with divx movies on the hard drive... this one started at 30 (another ntsc framerate) and dropped to 20 when I switched to either of those two power settings. I don't know... I don't want to say that the battery times I got before were at full processor speed because on max battery I can tell the difference in processor speeds... I'm just icked as to why sandra isn't registering it. Oh well... I'll keep looking into it!

Yes, that seemed to be the case with me as well... I think it may simply be how Sager set this one up to underclock... I'm not complaining, I got 2 hours on a dvd, lol. I'm going to set it up on Portable/Laptop and try running a battery benchmark to see how long that runs. Sorry about not being on the forums as much... Homework is piling up :-(

Alrighty, response to some questions... The screen is excellent... If you set it like I did at native resolution and change the dpi to the higher setting in XP, you will have no problems reading text. It is as clear as crystal. Ghosting isn't as big of a problem as it has been made out to be. It is there, but it honestly is not pertinent to much. It doesn't happen in games and movies to any noticeable extent, and that's the only place it truly matters.

Yale kinda mixed something up... When you set it on non-native resolution, the problem is not so much that the image gets stretched. The problem is that there are a certain number of physical dots (pixels) in the screen... this is called native. On a UXGA screen, the native resolution is 1600x1200. So, if you set it at something lower than that, the graphics card has to use an algorythm to assign a certain number of physical dots to displayed dots. If you set it at 1024x768, for example, the numbers don't divide to be whole numbers, so you'll have like 1.3 physical dots per displayed dots (this isn't the actual number, it's just an example)... The screen can't display .3 dots, lol, so it has to round. Thus, you get fuzziness in text. Setting the screen to native and raising the dpi makes for a clear screen with excellent readability.

As far as the keyboard key travel, I measured it with a ruler at between 2 and 3 mm... but it feels great to type on IMHO (prolly because I've been typing exclusively on laptop keyboards for more than a year). Hope that helps!

I did a battery benchmark with the power setting to portable/laptop. I used the same scenario as before... a dvd movie, minimum screen brightness (still pretty bright, though), half volume, no peripherals. I got 1:40 or so... so I guess the other setting does underclock something, lol, but it causes the movie playback to drop in framerate. I'll have to look into this some more.

Also, when I turned off all of the lights in my room last night to go to sleep, the 8887 was still on, and the screen was closed... The plastic on the back of the screen is translucent! It lets the backlight through... It only shows up in pitch black, but I thought it looked pretty sweet :-) At first, I thought that indicated that the plastic was thin and not strong, but I pushed down on it and it didn't budge, and I pushed pretty hard, so I was satisfied :-)

Have a great day everyone!

Today I took my 8887 to classes with me... I spent about 40 minutes taking notes (processor was not underclocked... screen was at minimum brightness). I then shut it down. I turned it back on later, defragmented my hard drive for a full hour... same settings, except the screen was off for the whole time it was defragging. Thes screen takes tons of power, so I advise people to set it to shut off after a minute when on battery power. Then, I shut it down, started it back up later and am typing on it now. I have been for about 20 minutes and it's still showing 21 minutes remaining... I have my external usb lightup mouse plugged in for this last session (the past 20 minutes) and the external speakers are hooked up and I'm obviously on lan since I'm typing. Hope that helps a lil with battery time :-) Keep in mind that the processor was not underclocked... the power scheme is set to portable/laptop and I'm pretty sure it only underclocks on max battery... at least that's what I'm going with for now, lol. The fact of the matter is, it's lasted this long and I know that it is performing as though it was plugged in and on ac power.

As far as being at 800x600, it is DEFINITELY less fuzzy than other non-native resolutions. It's kinda big for my taste, though... not much desktop space :-) If you prefer that, though, or if you want to read something without squinting (if your eyes don't like small text), then definitely go with 800x600 and turn the dpi DOWN if you raised it for 1600x1200. I changed the resolution in battlefield to 800x600 just to see if it's any better than 1024x768... Here's the difference: 800x600 is still pixelized, just like it would always be on any screen, lol, because 800x600 is not a high resolution (well, unless you're on a tv or on a really small screen, lol). But, in games, 800x600 is EVENLY pixelized... As in, the squared edges you get with diagonal lines are made of the same sized squares, lol. With any other non-native resolution possible on this screen, the lines that are diagonal are unevenly pixelized... Instead of having a bunch of little squares, some are long rectangles, some are squares, each of different lengths... Now, I'm talking tiny here of course, because that's how big the dots are, lol. But, if you look closely, you can always see pixelization. Hope this helps!

You don't have to restart with a dpi change in XP... I'm almost certain of that. Almost, lol. I can't remember whether I did or not last time I made the change

Well, I downloaded the new 3dmark2003... It didn't finish using the default drivers from Sager. I have dx9 installed, so I just installed the newest drivers from s-seven.net. They're the 6292 drivers. I'm going to try the benchmark again. I just tried the benchmark and got a 922. There are lots of bugs with the new benchmark, though. Oh well. Definitely nice graphics, and definitely next generation. I don't expect to play those games on those settings on many computers... lol.

Alrighty, well, a little addition here about longevity... I've had the 8887 on constantly (except for the time it was off between classes yesterday when on battery power) for several days now. It's been doing constant work... For example, I ripped several dvds to see how it did on time after it's been on and warmed up. I ripped dvds overnight several times (lol, the same one several times mainly) and defragmented and what not. Basically, I didn't let it idle (ran benchmarks, sandra, 3dmark). The scores on those aren't relevent cuz they didn't vary from the norm that everyone has been reporting. The main thing is, the fans have been on and off like usual... NO instability. I came back, and I just moved the mouse and the screen turned on and it was ready for more... I know many computers that won't turn the screen back on after some punishment, lol. Nothing of the sort with the 8887. Runs like a charm. DVD rip times varied... I ripped Barry Lyndon, which is a 3 hour movie, to SIX SVCDs in like 3.5 hours (that's excellent...). I ripped it to DivX in like 2.5.... Definitely wow. So, I have absolutely no complaints about the 8887's ability to remain running, whether it be for heat or stability or performance or longevity. Hope this helps others establish their schema for the 8887... I can say for certain that this fact doesn't apply to many laptops...