Got a new laptop. Samsung RF510. 8Gb RAM, 640Gb HDD and dual-core 2.5Ghz i5. Good ports: 4 USB of which 2 are USB3, HDMI, card reader, DVD writer etc. so the specs are good. Screen is nice. But it feels flimsy, light-weight. I particularly don’t like the design of the power cord which goes in the left side rather than the back and thus gets pulled round, and also doesn’t lock tightly into position. It also has that nasty Mac separated keyboard design, plus the tilde key is in a totally retarded place, both will take a while to get used to. They wouldn’t take this thing into space. Still, not terrible for £650 (less than half my Thinkpad T60 cost me). First things I installed were:
- Chrome
- Microsoft Security Essentials (remember to remove Norton and all the other crapware)
- Thunderbird
- Cygwin (vim, subversion, wget)
- Picasa
- Office
- iTunes :(((
Update: 4th July 2011 – Well the USB3 ports have not worked properly since I got this laptop. I finally dug into the problem and found Samsung are distributing very old versions of the USB3 drivers -2 .0.4.0. I have upgraded to the latest version I could find which is 2.1.16.0 (http://www.station-drivers.com/page/nec.htm) and hope this fixed the problem.