4750 Review

I've had this 4750 for a few days now and I must say that this is a VERY solid piece of machinery. (And *NO* dead/stuck pixels!)
The first thing you will notice about this is how big the screen really is and how vibrant the colors are on the WSXGA monitor.
I didn't get software pre-installed but I had no problems doing the installs myself. The only hiccup you might experience is the installation of the video camera since common sense will make you assume to install the "cam" driver instead of the "tas" driver. The other problem I experienced was figuring out how to get the USB drivers installed which was manually pointing windows XP to find the drivers on your CDROM.

Once software was installed, I hooked up a wireless router- I'm currently using Netgear's WGT624 v2 108G wireless router with firewall protection. The transmission radius of this device is wonderful and I get excellent reception throughout my girlfriend's apartment. No problems using this wireless device and the features of the Gigabyte card are very intuitive and easy to use.

DVD playback is not that bad using the default drivers that came with the 9700. I didn't install the DVD playback software and I don't use Windows Media Player. I'm using NERO (full edition) to play DVDs on this notebook and it only seems to sputter a little bit here and there but not bad enough to ruin the movie enjoyment. I'm just going to wait and see what future drivers do for DVD playback before making this a gripe.

80GB hard drive works well and seems to be fast enough for my needs. Being a photoshop, illustrator, flash designer with the occasional Far Cry game playing- this hard drive suits my needs well. The extra space is perfect for partitioning the drive (C:\ and D:\) to satisfy my categorization and storage requirements.

Battery life is longer than what I expected from a notebook of this size. I was using my laptop to configure a new network at my new job using battery power. An hour passed and I expected to see my battery life nearly drained (like it was with the Sony VAIO laptop I used to use). I was surprised to see that battery life was above 50%. Just like everyone else who owns this laptop- you can get over 2 hours of useage.

5 speaker sound isn't fantastic but for being default speakers on a notebook computer, it's pretty darn good sounding after tweaking it a little with the EQ found on the SoundMax controls. The placement for audio jacks could have been a little better thought out but it's not cumbersome.

Game play is smooth and error free- I'm currently playing Far Cry with no problems. I haven't really performed any benchmarks but I haven't had any noticeable slowdowns either. It's working well and that's good enough for me.

I tried to test the multi-card reader but was unsuccessful. I might have over-looked something but more than likely, this card reader just doesn't accept Olympus Camera's xD cards from my C-750 Ultra Zoom. If this *DOES* accept xD cards, someone let me know, please. The xD card doesn't really feel like it fits in the slot so I'm assuming it's not compatible.

The computer comes with a case which you will more than likely replace with something else. I went to Electronic Fry's and bought a Targus 17" notebook case which has more than enough room to tote this huge computer around along with a mouse, powersupply, CD's, pens, and my cell phone.

The casing of this notebook is sturdy and doesn't show signs of weakness around the hinges when opening and closing. I was looking to see if a reinforcement modification would be needed. Nope. Solid plastics, solid build.

Overall, the screen is what makes this notebook shine. My girlfriend and I prefer to watch DVD's on the computer rather than on the TV now.

It's that good.

As my girlfriend said, when you open the notebook, "there should be drapes that open from the side like a movie theater."

I can't wait for 64 bit applications just because this notebook is capable but so far, everything I've run on here works better than I expected.

I recommend this to anyone planning on getting a notebook. The "wow" factor of the screen alone makes this computer great.

Doesn't it? It *Doesn't* get 100C except when I'm being a smart @$$ like right now.

Seriously, I haven't noticed much heat because I always place the notebook on a clean, flat, hard surface so ventilation isn't obstructed.
I did once place this on the bed and started playing Far Cry. The heat became unbearable. I run this game at a relatively high setting- but not at it's maximum.

I'd say a little on the warm side but not hot.

It could be your combination of 3400 *AND* the 7200 RPM drive you have. That is of course if you have that combination (I have to check your config because I'm assuming right now).

I usually buy the middle of the three AMD chips on the market at the time because you can almost ALWAYS OC it to the higher chip speed for less of the cost.
When the Athlon XP 2500, 2800, and 3000 came out, I bought the 2800 and over clocked it to 2.2 GHz w/a 410 MHz FSB. Nothing fancy for bragging rights in OCing but good enough to satisfy me.

I didn't do that much research on the 64 chips, but I figured it safe to buy the middle market chip. Good topic on heat and the 3400 chip.
Your theory just makes too much sense. I wonder what the differences are?

Wow, using WinAmp I get constant glitches and hiccups where it is annoying. I don't think it has anything to do with the version of WinAmp since I started with 5.03a and now I'm using 5.04 with the same results.

I just took a look at my device manager and clicked on Monitor. There were a total of 5 "default monitors."

Can someone else see how many are showing in their 4750?? Maybe this is causing the hiccups.