Guys,
I spent the majority of last evening reading various forum threads to see if anyone else has been having any of the same issues as I have. Please no flaming: I do realize I'm posting about a non-Sager branded laptop in a Sager forum but as they're all really Clevo D470K's I don't really see much of a difference with the exception of which company offers support.
To set the stage I pre-ordered a D470K from M-Tech Laptops within days of M-Tech opening up sales on this model. I received mine in early August, unboxed it and immediately began having BSOD errors. I returned it through Pro-Star's RMA process and received what they said was a new unit. Additionally the power cable from the transformer to the laptop had separated from the brick exposing about 1/8" of braided steel shielding.
I had the same issues with the wireless as another user who's comments I read: anytime I'd transfer a large file wirelessly the PC would lock up and require a power cycle to regain usefulness. Until the latest version of the Gigabyte wifi drivers I'd mostly solved this by using reference Atheros drivers and switching antenna posts on the wifi card in the laptop. I have had the video playback problems but as I tend to stream video from a computer on the network to the laptop via the wireless network I attribute these to the wifi drivers locking up the PC though I can lock the computer up upon request by queue'ing multiple .avi's and skipping from one to the next. Until discovering this forum last evening I was unaware of a BIOS update but, as you'll learn below, I can't test to see if a combination of BIOS updates, drivermodder'ed catalysts/omega drivers has fixed this issue....
The laptop I ordered is fully loaded and when the new one was returned to me with a new power supply I noticed that after adding the WEP key to the profile for the wireless network I have at home it associated immediately. Strange as in addition to WEP I also have MAC filtering turned on. Sure enough Pro-Star pulled the Wifi card out of the laptop I'd sent to them and put it into the new one. Several calls later they cross shipped a new wifi card to me. In the back of my mind I began questioning just how many of the compnents in the "new" laptop that Pro-Star sent to me were from the laptop I'd RMA'ed but as it seemed to function properly I didn't press the issue.
Over the past few months the new laptop has worked well. I've played many hours of Counterstrike, HL2, Doom 3, etc... I frequently go to LAN parties and this laptop was purchased partially to keep me from having to lug 100 lbs of computer to sites to play. I've burned CD's, DVD's, used the laptop to snag a torrent or two, to develop documents, to take notes at school, etc...
Basically I'm using it like anyone would expect to use a laptop though I've come to the conclusion that I'm doing the equivalent of driving a ferrari to get the groceries...
In the past two weeks I've be experiencing random but increasingly frequent kernel errors. Most commonly they are Stop 0x0000007A or KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR which microsoft indicates is some sort of Hard Drive I/O error. From the rest of the memory dump I've gathered that it's either a hard drive, a hard drive controller, memory or some other hardware error. I've eliminated the hard drive: I ghosted the existing hard drive to a known good drive last evening, swapped drives and had the error repeat itself within minutes after WinXP desktop load. Even worse is that about 1/4th the time that the laptop BSOD's and reboots the BIOS doesn't report a hard drive.
I can't eliminate the other possibilities listed by microsoft and can't guarantee that Tech Support will be able to reproduce the problem: I was at a LAN party last Saturday and gamed for about 10 hours straight without a single lockup. Other than reseating the memory (which I've done) I'm out of ideas.
So, back to Pro-Star it goes. I wouldn't be nearly as upset as I am if they'd pick up the cost of shipping the laptop to them. At this rate I'll be shipping my laptop to Pro-Star 3 more times at about $70.00 per incident during the manufacturer's warantee. While that may not seem like much to some it does to me. What really ticked me off is that if it were in the extended warrantee period (which I did purchase with the laptop) Phillips would pay for the shipping... Sigh...
So, I have a love/hate relationship going on: I love the laptop, all of the features it has and the ability to game to my hearts content but hate that it seems to be poorly designed or designed using inferior components which fail on a regular basis.
Oh, the new power supply? The cord's separated again...
Anyway, I'd be interested in hearing if anyone else has had similar issues with their 4750 or D470K series laptop... It'll give me something to read while I wait for another one to be shipped to me by Pro-Star.
Chris
I spent the majority of last evening reading various forum threads to see if anyone else has been having any of the same issues as I have. Please no flaming: I do realize I'm posting about a non-Sager branded laptop in a Sager forum but as they're all really Clevo D470K's I don't really see much of a difference with the exception of which company offers support.
To set the stage I pre-ordered a D470K from M-Tech Laptops within days of M-Tech opening up sales on this model. I received mine in early August, unboxed it and immediately began having BSOD errors. I returned it through Pro-Star's RMA process and received what they said was a new unit. Additionally the power cable from the transformer to the laptop had separated from the brick exposing about 1/8" of braided steel shielding.
I had the same issues with the wireless as another user who's comments I read: anytime I'd transfer a large file wirelessly the PC would lock up and require a power cycle to regain usefulness. Until the latest version of the Gigabyte wifi drivers I'd mostly solved this by using reference Atheros drivers and switching antenna posts on the wifi card in the laptop. I have had the video playback problems but as I tend to stream video from a computer on the network to the laptop via the wireless network I attribute these to the wifi drivers locking up the PC though I can lock the computer up upon request by queue'ing multiple .avi's and skipping from one to the next. Until discovering this forum last evening I was unaware of a BIOS update but, as you'll learn below, I can't test to see if a combination of BIOS updates, drivermodder'ed catalysts/omega drivers has fixed this issue....
The laptop I ordered is fully loaded and when the new one was returned to me with a new power supply I noticed that after adding the WEP key to the profile for the wireless network I have at home it associated immediately. Strange as in addition to WEP I also have MAC filtering turned on. Sure enough Pro-Star pulled the Wifi card out of the laptop I'd sent to them and put it into the new one. Several calls later they cross shipped a new wifi card to me. In the back of my mind I began questioning just how many of the compnents in the "new" laptop that Pro-Star sent to me were from the laptop I'd RMA'ed but as it seemed to function properly I didn't press the issue.
Over the past few months the new laptop has worked well. I've played many hours of Counterstrike, HL2, Doom 3, etc... I frequently go to LAN parties and this laptop was purchased partially to keep me from having to lug 100 lbs of computer to sites to play. I've burned CD's, DVD's, used the laptop to snag a torrent or two, to develop documents, to take notes at school, etc...
Basically I'm using it like anyone would expect to use a laptop though I've come to the conclusion that I'm doing the equivalent of driving a ferrari to get the groceries...
In the past two weeks I've be experiencing random but increasingly frequent kernel errors. Most commonly they are Stop 0x0000007A or KERNEL_DATA_INPAGE_ERROR which microsoft indicates is some sort of Hard Drive I/O error. From the rest of the memory dump I've gathered that it's either a hard drive, a hard drive controller, memory or some other hardware error. I've eliminated the hard drive: I ghosted the existing hard drive to a known good drive last evening, swapped drives and had the error repeat itself within minutes after WinXP desktop load. Even worse is that about 1/4th the time that the laptop BSOD's and reboots the BIOS doesn't report a hard drive.
I can't eliminate the other possibilities listed by microsoft and can't guarantee that Tech Support will be able to reproduce the problem: I was at a LAN party last Saturday and gamed for about 10 hours straight without a single lockup. Other than reseating the memory (which I've done) I'm out of ideas.
So, back to Pro-Star it goes. I wouldn't be nearly as upset as I am if they'd pick up the cost of shipping the laptop to them. At this rate I'll be shipping my laptop to Pro-Star 3 more times at about $70.00 per incident during the manufacturer's warantee. While that may not seem like much to some it does to me. What really ticked me off is that if it were in the extended warrantee period (which I did purchase with the laptop) Phillips would pay for the shipping... Sigh...
So, I have a love/hate relationship going on: I love the laptop, all of the features it has and the ability to game to my hearts content but hate that it seems to be poorly designed or designed using inferior components which fail on a regular basis.
Oh, the new power supply? The cord's separated again...
Anyway, I'd be interested in hearing if anyone else has had similar issues with their 4750 or D470K series laptop... It'll give me something to read while I wait for another one to be shipped to me by Pro-Star.
Chris
) really have to have reliable PCs since a 4750ish problem would really screw them over in terms of image and monetary costs of returns, repairs, and replacements. I just hope that Compaq, HP, or Dell comes out with a nice PCI-E notebook with the new 533FSB Centrino's and a modular graphics system that doesn't weigh 13 pounds.
Too bulky. I'd probably go for the 3790, anybody here have experience with one or know someone who had? I'm just curious, I've already exhausted the forums looking at reviews and whatnot.
