You are browsing within the review sections of our forums. Content within these sections reflect consumer opinions of laptops. Our admins take the best and most objective laptop reviews and index them here to create a distinct selection of quality reviews with averaged overall ratings. Many of these reviews have benchmarks attached to them which allows for users to compare their laptop's performance with others, and ultimately enables us to provide a sortable list which at a glance show the fastest laptops amongst a variety of applications (gaming, video editing, web browsing, etc...). Help us build a better laptop database by submitting your laptop review.

Ronin,

the 1036 does have pcmcia as well as expresscard. The expresscard tv tuners are supposed to be available, but I have yet to see them.

The AverTV card is MCE certified so should work well with MCE. (Avermedia)

They should also be the ones with the first ExpressCard TV Tuners.

coffee is expresscard the same thing as the internal card available in pal only that was included in the euro version of the 1036???

ExpressCard is the standard that replaces PCMCIA 2.0 for as an expansion slot.

the expressCard slot is like the pcmcia slot, more narrow and not as deep into the system, though.

it's a full expansion slot like pcmcia, so we'll soon be seeing more and more uses for it. the expresscard TV card should be out anytime.

Well I have had this notebook for about 3 weeks now. Overall I like it. The quality feels solid, its thin and light in comparison to some others in this range. I get an average of 85 FPS in Half Life 2 on medium settings which blows my desktop box with ATI 9600 plus overclocked. Its smooth and never stuttered once. I have never had a laptop before. What I do no is that I never had a satisfying experience with a laptop when I used other peoples. They were always asking me to fix them. And my God reinstalling software in others laptops was slow and painful. Not so on this baby. Lightning fast with no hiccups.

Now for the not so good , I don't like the touch pad. It is way too sensitive and jumps my cursor off track when I'm typing especially when sweaty. The touch pad is UNUSABLE WHEN SWEATY!! If its hot out or your nervous you might as well break out the mouse cause you ain't doin nothing. Also I think the bios is in its infancy. Sometimes I get a non initialized screen when turning on from a cold start. The screen remains black. I also notice that sometimes the bios and Windows don't communicate when initializing hardware/software dependent starting tray items. Examples are Blue tooth tray module,touch pad module. Sometimes they start sometimes they don't. I reinstalled all drivers to see if it fixed the problem to no avail. I also turned off zone alarm with no luck. OH well overall it doesn't affect my productivity. Also the camera Hardware/software needs a bit of touch up work. Sometimes it will freeze up operating system.

When I open this baby people OH and ah

MSI I'm sure will take care of the kinks expected from a newly released laptop. This unit in my opinion is more than adequate for the power user. I chose this model because it was the only 64 bit laptop processor that was made for mobile computing with a 17inch screen. The athlon 64 was by no means mobile friendly. The turion was by far the better choice.

I can't believe a laptop like this is slept on. I've been waiting for a laptop like this for years. I don't understand why its not sold by more companies. Also 3+ hours battery life for a 17in with a better than average video card? That's wonderful. I happened across this thread by accident. I was originally giving up and just getting the Sager 5720, but this laptop finally fulfills the specs I've been hoping for since I first joined Notebook Forums. Now the money saving continues... Everyone, please write more reviews! thanks...

-Sneekgeek
love from chicago!

Hi all -
I just posted my review of RawPowerPC.com at resellerreview.com. Very Satisfied, just like everybody else. Are we all lying or did we all recieve such excellent service? Nobody is that good, we gotta be lying.
Lying.....down, sleeping and holding on tightly to our 1036's so that nobody can steal 'em from us, maybe!

A few concerns with the 1036 relate to the keyboard (I'm a right shift kinda guy, and it's super small). I've asked, and it's been forwarded to MSI (afaik), if I can "re-key" a couple keys - such as removing the lower | \ (below enter), and re-keying that to the up arrow, and making the right shift and current up arrow into a full size right shift.
I've also asked about re-keying the quick launch keys, such as the wireless key (since I didn't take that option, but am since regretting it, and looking at ordering it now, 4 weeks after purchase).
I was finally able to get the touchpad to die (FN+F3), when I installed SCM from the cd. I had issues with the bison cam, that required installing, uninstalling, re-installing and such, but finally got it to work, just not from the quick launch keys.
I'm really surprised that MSI didn't make a badge for the 1036, from the get-go. Just seems odd, that with that little hole, so much could get in there, and potentially ruin an awesome machine. Until my badge arrives, I've got some scotch tape covering the hole. On one hand, not having a badge allows me to go out and get a customized Theocrat badge, and let everybody think that I've got a new kick-ash machine. Wait, I do!
I'd like to know what others are doing, if anything to customize the outside box. I've put normal stickers on my old Great Quality (Fry's brand, not so Great or Quality) laptop, but took hours upon hours to get them off when I gave it to the wife. So now I've only got a small rub-on Stormtrooper head. Any other "modding" going on?
Thanks for all you've done here, it really helped in deciding with whom and what to order.

Be Well,
Theocrat

MSI-1036 owner since 01/30/06

glad you guys like the 1036 - there are always a few things that bother us, just depends on who we are.

i also noticed the webcam drivers don't show up in the driver CD window unless you've hit the hardware button first - an odd thing to me. you can always go find it on the CD, but it's not very logical.

Well, I got mine last Wednesday and loaded it up on Friday. Nothing but sweetness in windows xp since then. Runs HL2 at 1680x1050 and gets 50 fps average. Wow! My D470K only averaged 25-30 fps at that resolution, with roughly the same specs for cpu, ram and drive. Now the big thing to get working on it is Gentoo. Do any of you resellers know of any linux drivers available for this model? I guess the biggest one I'd need is network. The rest of them can be worked around later, but it's kinda hard to do a network install without any network cards available. MSI's site shows it to be a Realtek 8139, but it's not. Mine has an Agere gigabit controller in it? Drivers supplied on cd are for Agere (both modem and lan) so I went looking for them on MSI. No joy there.

Went to Agere's site, and they don't list any drivers except for a single modem. I realize that they make components for other manufacturers, but you would think they would at least have their generic driver available.

Anybody?

Just ordered mine...cant wait to get it!!!!!!!

dadams1969:

I should be receiving mine any day now (shipped Friday), and will immediately be installing Gentoo 2006.0 (which was just released this weekend). If I find a solution to the driver problem, I will let you know. Conversely, if you find one, please post here. Thanks.

Also, if you have wireless availability, seems like ndiswrapper or something similar should take care of that. So perhaps the additional package CD contains this, and you can do this wirelessly.

Alternately, have you tried modprobing every available network device to add kernel support? (kind of desperate, I know)

Edit: I have no idea how experienced you are, being not much but a n00b myself, but I just wanted to make sure that you tried the command "lspci" (after emerging pciutils) to ensure it is actually an agere chipset and not something more common. Sorry if this is a stupid suggestion.

2nd Edit: After looking closely, yes, MSI does claim the modem is agere and the lan is realtek. However, in Gentoo (at least 2005.x), you would need to modprobe 8139 before the lan would work. try "modprobe 8139" or "modprobe 8139too."

can anyone give me the dimensions of this badboy? Im looking to find a sleeve that fits it.

Thanks

**Did a little looking around and found them its: 15.6" x 10.94" x 1.37"

To follow up, dadams, I got mine and tried to install gentoo. lspci revealed that my ethernet IS agere and the wireless card is RaLink rt2500. So I've decided to burn a cd with the ebuilds of rt2500 and ndiswrapper, as well as their dependencies, then follow gentoo wiki's third party ebuild directions:

http://gentoo-wiki.com/HOWTO_Install..._Party_Ebuilds

If this doesn't work, I'll just try to mount it as if it were the additional package CD and try emerge -k.

Just received my 1036 and man am I stoked, loading up everything now...cant wait to try the new Battle for Middle Earth 2 on it!!!!!

I've been looking into this and wondering - is there a way I can order this laptop WITHOUT the numeric keypad?