Review: Chuck232's Thorough Z71V Review (56K beware) - Page 4

I've tried Ubuntu as well as SuSE 9.3 on the Z71V. Ubuntu had an annoying hotplug problem with my laptop and SuSE 9.3 I found out doesn't play well with Windows on my laptop. For some reason or other, it would disable my ethernet permanently under Windows so I that I could only use the internet in Linux. I've uninstalled both now and I'm only running Windows until I can figure it out.

Thanks a lot and you've got a PM waiting for ya there.

Photo editing, hmmmm... I personally don't have any problems with doing some touching up oh photos and working with my digital album on the laptop, but then again I'm definitely no power-graphics guy. If you're just doing this stuff as leisure, it should be fine. If you're doing graphics as a trade, I'd probably steer you away. For gaming, don't expect to play the latest games at the native resolution of 1680x1050. Games like Rome Total War and America's Army will play fine at that resolution, but Far Cry won't unless you turn the details way down. I personally haven't run Quake 4, FEAR or the newest gen games on this laptop (I definitely don't play enough games for a comp eng major ) but those would be pushing the Go 6600 in here, especially since some of the higher end desktop cards even have trouble with some of those games.

That screenshot's from quite a long while ago when I was still using FlyAKiteOSX. It's basically a complete Windows shell that replaces a lot of the UI. The primary site is here. As you can see, version 3 should be coming out soon, but to get the version 2 for now, you can grab that here.


The sparkling screen really means a slight shimmering of the pixels. On some solid colors, it seems like almost more than one color is present. Ah, it's so hard to describe and I tried multiple times to get a photo of it, but it's damn near impossible. It's almost like very slightly foggy, but doesn't affect actual clarity. Here's a couple pictures, but I'm not sure if it's all that accurate of what you actually see. These are pretty zoomed in so it really exaggerates the effect. Plus the camera can't capture it exactly. You may get an idea though. Looks more like the first than the second picture. (At least on my screen)




As for the thickness, I just took this picture for you so you can get a feeling of just how thick it is. Remember that the feet raise it off the table about 4mm.



And I updated the review some more (some stuff I wrote wasn't entirely correct now that I've used it quite some while now) and I've hosted it on my site in separate pages so it's a little more organized.