unreal25

I never had any drivers for the router. Basically all that I changed when I replaced mine was set up a port forwarding settings, wireless settings etc. It's basically just plug-n-play. But maybe I missed what you're asked; if so correct me.

Just amazing and touching.... (I love Cafe Del Mar stuff)

Silver chassis ftw.

And the reported just "happened" to be there. Right.

That's great news! It would be sweet if they make it an option to choose the IPS RGB LED one they offered (or still do) on Precision M6600.

90% gamut yeah, rofl... good one... Dell/AW is too cheap for that. If you want a good display these days you have to go business (Thinkpad, Precision etc.) that's a fact. 1080p on 18.4" also hardly impressive. Its more important to have something like 3D shit that you'll use only once and toss it away, since no game will support it.

Its an interesting idea but my policy is to NEVER open a laptop unless you are: 1. servicing something (cleaning fans, replacing a part) 2. upgrading (installing more memory, HD,...) In this whole process of looking for a flaw, you might just create one. (I am thinking here of the cursed top plastic cover on Alienwares that has to "snap" and the little latches break in like 90% of the times.) That said, if its a new laptop, why assume it has defects -- it has a warranty right? So if something is discovered later as wrong, just report it.

Hey, np. Few things: - wPrime is good to see how the CPU runs at 100% utilization, whether it throttles down, overheats etc. - Furmark is good to test the maximum possible temp your GPU will use, but I would actually suggest not using it, at least not at this point. It has a burn-in option that pushes your GPU a bit more than 99.99% of the games ever will. Some Alienware reps suggested not running that as it can overheat their GPUs (which I found really funny since its supposed to be a high-end gaming laptop). - 3DMark 11 or 3DMark Vantage are decent benchmarks so you can get a number and compare that number with different people who use the same computer. I am not sure what kind of cooling this MSI has but if the GPU runs at 90+ C while gaming, it probably needs a better cooling paste etc. Since its new, it should run a bit below that though. I consider CPU and GPU temps up to 80C during heavy gaming acceptable. If it runs too hot the computer will automatically shut down or the CPU/GPU will downclock in order to cool down... but why push it. - The best way is of course to run some 3D games and check out the FPS. - I suggest you try out Microsoft Security Essentials as an anti-virus solution. It is free if you didn't pirate Windows and just works fantastically good for me I put it on all my computers. AVG is fine too if you don't want to mess around but I found MSE far less intrusive and annoying than anything else. Also I deliberately avoided suggestion to check the ports, because at least for me for USB, the windows can bug out if you keep plugging in the same device to different ports (I think it keeps reinstalling the same driver or does something equally dumb). If you have an old-school crappy USB mouse that you can just plug in and see if it lights up, that will work fine though.

Yeah, I lived in the US for a while now so I got used to different pronunciations. That said, if I said it, I bet there would be no difference.

Haha good one. But even as a non-native speaker, I figured out it's not "niggers" by the way he pronounced it. I wouldn't know how to spell it out if I haven't seen it, but I was 100% sure it was something weird.

I am guessing you bought a used one? If so, I'd do the following: - Install some temperature monitoring software (like HWInfo) - Turn it on and see whether it works, run some benchmarks, see whether the numbers are roughly there and monitor the temperatures, see if it is overheating. - Check for scratches etc. - Check the status of your warranty online if possible - Check for dead pixels, say create completely white image then stretch it on full screen Also I don't know much about MSI but Thinkpads have a software that lets you check the number of battery cycles, so if you can do that check that out. [see here] I hope this helps.

I was aiming at that its likely it won't work and that due to that (untested) its price was unrealistically high.

Yeah it does remove a lot of shadows but still looks pretty good to me. It also depends on the location... e.g. I'd definitely turn the shadows high on tattooine but I did get some FPS loss when we did a raid boss (vsync was off however, so it could have been that too). Also a lot of the shadows are pixelated, the same problem I had in Skyrim and just looked weird. I am usually more bothered by pixelated edges, but on the resolution I am playing there's no problem there. On the other hand, they did improve their engine by quite a bit since the first beta I was in. At that time, playing this game was like running Furmark burn test. Just doesn't feel like properly coded game.

Its probably an average screen in terms of the image quality, but is relatively high resolution. (for example, all Macbooks I've seen have much better quality displays) If these two aren't the only choices, or rather if I was buying an M17x right now (well OK I wouldn't buy it, because I don't like their cheap/regular screens on these high end machines... but if I would), I would go with: - the cheapest CPU (i7 2670M), which is btw, a pretty fast CPU and I imagine by the time CPU becomes the bottleneck for playing games we'll go through at least 3 more generations of GPUs - the best GPU, because it will mean a world to have a powerful graphic card for pretty much any game), which I believe is GTX 580M - regular 1080p screen, but if you really have fetish for 3D, go for it, its just seems too expensive to me to be worth it (no idea what use would be 120Hz screen otherwise since its not the same refresh rate mechanism as on CRT screens.... but maybe improves the display quality a little). My opinion for $350 just rofl - no. - cheapest HD option, since you should get caddies for both slots and can easily upgrade the hard drive later (I am guessing the design is pretty similar to M17x-R2) - cheapest memory, again as said above upgrading on your own is tons cheaper and does not void warranty - cheapest WiFi card (get a good N-router instead imo, because having a super-imba-killer WiFi card will mean nothing if you have a $20 router) - DVD // BluRay dunno if you use, I used this drive once in last 2 years to install windows I don't know what are the prices in the UK, but if its still too expensive, you can cut still cut the corner I guess, on the GPU but then probably not worth getting.

Between these two, my opinion is M17x-R2, because it has dual cards. If it comes with an RGB LED screen that would be fantastic. R3 does have a bit faster CPU, but I doubt it can have nearly impact on game FPS as a second GPU (I don't really see the point of these super-fast CPUs unless all you want to do on a laptop is run benchmarks or play crappy ports like GTA4). If memory serves me well, a single GTX 460M is somewhere in line with a single 5870M.

Hey just found better settings: all HIGH except Shadows (I set it to Low). Grass and Trees to 100% and VSync on (I took me about 20 tried to get it on without flickering.) With that GPU load is about 63% on both cards and the fans on M17x are on their lowest setting (quiet humming sound). Getting steady 40-60FPS.

LOL Brian, you spend more time acquiring and swapping laptops from/with Dell than using them. Hope the new lid is fine.

Also I looked a bit more it seems its possible it is matte screen if its the same one as used in Thinkpad T420. If it is really the same screen, I head its relatively poor. (But I guess it works fine.)

There are plenty of eBay ads that are incorrect, and this may be one of those. $90 for an untested screen? rofl... this screams scam.

Oh yeah, I broke my joystick so many times on that thing (my dad was fixing them each time). Found another good one:

Thanks! Heh nope, the video is made in 60ies by late David Rogers at Vanderbilt University. Cool research! And cancer research is currently very hot topic, but more important is whether you enjoy it. (If you don't you might as well do something else that you don't enjoy and at least earn more money. ) In any case, I think its very admirable that you're already involved in this kind of research. If nothing else, you get some experience, which can't hurt right?

I think we already had a similar thread. Anyway, I started with Commodore 64 and audio tapes, drawing nude babes in ASCII when I was like 8 (lol)... my dad saw it once and laughed his ass off. First laptop I saw was some IBM Thinkpad on one of the computer fairs that used to be held every year and where the teacher from the computing lab from my elementary school took us every year. I remember the guy in the suit coming up to me (I was like 12) and told me they don't have any games there (dick). But hey, the justice has been (unintentionally) served a few years later in my high school my class visits the same faire again, this time armed with 3.5" floppy drivers armed with the code that introduces some malicious code in computers master boot record (ah, the puberty!). On my C64, I played imba games such as , , ... ah good old days and honestly had more fun with any of these than I had playing Battlefield. These days I mainly play SWTOR, League of Legends, and occasionally Crysis 2 (its funny how little some games have evolved from Wolfenstein 3D in terms of gameplay) and Skyrim.

Ah thanks! I actually plan to put up a website of my research that *should* be sort of understandable but I was just too busy recently to work on it at all. Basically I am working towards a PhD in Physics at one of the, as you put it, "pretty prestigious" schools in upstate NY. I work in the field of biophysics doing both experimental and computational work. Simply put, I study how living cells can sense and respond to very weak signals from their environment and I try to answer how the limit of this sensing is achieved. For example, in my lab we study amoebae which can hunt and eat bacteria (amoeba is about 10X bigger). The way it works is bacteria constantly poops out molecules that are byproducts of its metabolism and amoeba has evolved to be able to detect these signaling molecules. The way the detection works: the amoeba has lots of (about 100,000) of small proteins on its surface that can bind these molecules but for a short time. So in the environment where each molecule is moving quite chaotically the amoeba is constantly being bombarded by these signals that constantly bind and unbind, but on average there will be a little more of these events on the part of amoeba's surface facing bacteria, than other -- because the molecules are coming from there so there is a gradient. The amoeba then uses that information to move towards its food source (yummy bacteria) and eats it. So basically one of the things I am doing is trying to make a model of these binding/unbinding events and the noise that is associated with them due to the random nature of these molecules hitting the surface of amoeba and randomness of these binding/unbinding processes. The reason is that we need another model to explain our experimental data -- which the current, "simple" model, cannot. Overall I use some ideas from physics, obviously doing a lot of experimental biology, mainly working with living cells in the lab, and also I apply some ideas from computer science (mainly the information theory) to try to understand what amount of information cells can get about which way to go at different steps of this sensing process. It is a very similar process to how white blood cells in your body react when you get hurt and infected, since its basically a study how the cells sense and respond to a particular signal -- there's a cool video showing the white blood cell chasing and eliminating a bacteria: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWUmXx5V_wE As for you, I think its great that you have the opportunity to go to a good school and its certainly very helpful to get into the "pretty prestigious" university. Even though I have to say, I was a teaching assistant for about 2-3 years in various physics courses here, and can't say that I am impressed with the general knowledge of about 95% of my incoming students. In fact, even for people claiming to have taken Advanced Placement courses, their math knowledge was very poor (no offense to anyone, but where I come from with that knowledge you wouldn't get in anywhere). However, I do mostly enjoy working with them, as they are nice people and because I just like to talk about physics. The good thing in the US is that you don't have to choose your major until I think your 2nd year, so you'll definitely be able to explore different things. Also, it will make a huge difference to talk to university professors. My adviser is one of the people advising several of our undergraduate students (most of the time about choosing a major), so sometimes I got a chance to talk to them as well. We also had a high school student working with us in the lab once and that went pretty well, so I am assuming that helped him as well in applying to college.

Hey Steven, I know this is an M14x thread but nevertheless, I thought I'd share what I am getting: System: M17x-r2, i7-620m, ATI 5870m crossfire, 4gb ram @ 1067mhz, OCZ Vertex 2 120GB SSD Game Graphics Options: Native Resolution 1920x1200 (full screen) All Option Enabled and HIGH Grass - 75% Trees - 50% I get anywhere between 20 and 100 FPS depending on the area. Given that you said you had grass and trees on 100% I guess you haven't been on Alderaan. Let me know whether you still get good FPS there. Shadows High-Low does have a massive FPS impact. Also, sometimes I am getting FPS loss if I alt+tab and come back into the game. GPU Utilization during game: 99-100 % on both GPUs GPU Temps: 67-77 C on both GPUs (Arctic Cooling MX-4 on Memory, AS5 on GPU die, no retention mod (yet), stock clocks 700/1000MHz, repasted ~6months ago) CPU Utilization during game: ~80 % CPU Temps: ~70 C (never repasted, stock with default TurboBoost settings)

Welcome aboard Sgt. Maj. Wifey, Si... I mean ma'am! And congrats on getting a proper gaming machine.