A full Sager 8890 experience review - Page 3

The link should be fixed now. Sorry.

I can see myself using it somewhat regularly. I don't really watch that much TV but it's nice to be able to do so while working or playing a game without having to move my laptop to a different room. I've long considered putting a small TV in my office but this is a far better solution. I, like Element, also plan to burn CDs of my favorite episodes of the Simpsons and of Discovery Channel specials that I like (assuming I get the recorder to start working without crashing the program).

Part 12. Sager Tech Support

I called tech support for the first time today due to two TV Tuner problems. First, I lost all sound from TV Studio, and second I was unable to record anything using TV Studio. I first tried PCTorque tech support. They were very nice but shortly told me to call Sager as they didn't know what could be causing my problem. After calling Sager I was less than thrilled. Sager did not take my call right away. There was not even a wait on hold option. Instead the recording suggested that I either fill out the web form or leave a message and they would call me in the order that my message was received. I chose to leave a message and received a call about an hour and a half later. The quality of the tech support was good. The support person knew the exact cause of one of the problems (the cause of the recording crash). The other problem he didn't help me fix but rather suggested that I reinstall the drivers from the disk that came with my computer. Reinstalling the drivers didn't work, but I discovered the problem anyway. I'll list the solutions here because everyone with an 8890 with a HT processor will need to do the recording fix and the other one may come in handy as well.

Recording a tv show using TV Studio
In order to record a show using TV studio you need to first download the HT version of TV Studio from here. It's the last item on the page. Do not install the drivers, only the program. After that you should be able to use TV Studio to record. I would recommend that you uninstall TV Studio before doing this just to be on the safe side.

I have no sound in TV Studio...HELP!
Go to the control panel and open Sounds and Audio Devices. Under Device volume select Advanced. Make sure the Aux is not muted or all the way to zero. If you don't see Aux, go to the options menu and select properties. Scroll through the list until you see Aux and put a check by it then click ok. When I installed WinDVR (which sucked by the way...had to use the power button to turn the machine off because it hard locked it) it must have set this to zero resulting in no sound for me.

edit:
When you reinstall TV Studio make sure you first uninstall TV Studio (but not the driver). Unzip the downloaded file and run the install from TV_TUNER_HT\TVFLEET\WIN2000_WDM\DISK1, not the top level. If you run the install from the top level it won't work. Sorry for the confusion.

Part 13. The TV Recorder

The TV recorder quality is quite good. I heard lots of people say this was bad so I was pretty concerned, but I found that it's not a problem (for me at least) at all. Here's a small MPG that I recorded to demonstrate the quality. I have a much larger sample but am out of webspace again. A few people were willing to help out so I'll hit one of them up for some space and fix the link to point to that one.

Re: Keyboard situation

Yes I did speak to them about the keyboard problem. I wasn't going to post about it until I got the fix and tried it out, but it's basically a couple of pads that I can use to stop the play. The only concern is that as you mentioned in your post the hot shape if you will of the plate under the keyboard may be different enough that it makes the pads stress the keyboard when either off or on. I'll try it out and let you guys know. As for the pics, also received them in email but they are already posted in the Tech support section for the 888X series by Adam.

Part 14. Playing with the Gfx Card

I tried overclocking the graphics card slightly using powerstrip today. I wasn't really brave enough to try this on my own so I waited and read this thread where E-Cat1 did all the scary work such as "hmmm...I wonder if increasing the core clock another 5 MHz will cause it to melt through the bottom of my laptop". Anyway the numbers that he settled on were core 400 (up from the default 350) and RAM 280 (up from 256). I then re-ran 3dMark2001 and got a score of 11172. Pretty respectable if I might say so myself .

There was no noticable increase in the heat and I was not using any cooling pad, just my desktop.

No I haven't. I'm not a huge OCer (I read about it, but don't participate in it ) so I haven't really pushed it to the max. Incidentally E-Cat1 got 11725 for his score and he also reports that there isn't a noticable increase in heat or any instability. I'm sure you could push it a bit further...when my laptop gets a bit older I might try it. The scores I'm getting right now however are more than enough to make my gaming experiences very pleasurable (well if I have a hard time it won't be because of the gfx card ).