Samsung R700

Have owned R700 for 18 months and have been pretty pleased with it. However, the screen packed up 3 months ago and had to be replaced. I was fortunate that I had bought from John Lewis as they include a 2 year guarantee in the competitive price. It was repaired under guarantee in 24 hours by the LapTop Hut in Brighton. Now the screen is showing signs of packing up again - but JL no longer uses LTH and I am told the repair could take up to 2 weeks which is laughable and a real problem as I use my machine every day for work. I'm not so happy now and it would seem I am not the only one who has had a screen fail.

Screen packed up after year and a half and no way of complaining to Samsung.

Should never have trusted an unknown laptop brand

Not only is this laptop packing a high end mobile graphics card, but it does so at half the price of similar specs laptops. Has a very good quality microphone considering its just a dot under the ctrl key, but reproduces my voice more clearly than my £80 headset. 3GB of ram is plenty for vista and pretty much any application you might want to run, and the 2.0GHZ processor might sound low, but its a Core2 duo and so is actually a few times faster than an equivalently clocked Pentium. Another outstanding feature is the keyboard, very comfortable to type on and even has a number pad. This brings me onto my biggest gripe with this laptop (and its a tiny one); the Fn key is in the bottom left corner of the keyboard where the Ctrl key should be, as a gamer, easy access to this key is essential!The battery is very good for the screen size/specs too, and even has a physical gauge on it so you can see how much power is left without even turning the laptop on (3 hours of word processing/Internet browsing, 2 hours of power saving gaming or a bit over 1 hour under high performance mode gaming). Power consumption can be regulated by holding Fn and pressing F8, this bring up a box which lets you switch between 3 modes: Silent mode, normal mode and speed mode, this raises or lowers system clock speeds to reduce power consumption/heat output and performance, although older games such as world of warcraft show little slow-down in silent mode, allowing extended play time away from a socket. While on the subject of power consumption, I'll mention that you can fiddle with the power settings in vista to instruct it to go into sleep mode at a certain % of battery, even when i have this set a 1%, 2 hours later it will still be on, so you can easily resume working once plugged in again.For people who are not so computer literate, it comes set up fine, and even has software that easily fixes many problems that may arise and keeps drivers and such up to date. Another nice perk is the motion cam, which doesn't require any setting up and works straight away with skype, or you can just mess around with the 'play cam' software. 320GB of hard drive spaces is generous, the card reader is useful for dumping pictures come from the SD card from my camera, the rest is pretty standard such as usb ports, Ethernet/phone line input, DVD burner, express card slot, mic/headphones jacks, VGA out plug and a HDMI output (OK, so maybe not that standard but iv never used it).

So many: good design, performance, light, well made and simply superb value for money. I researched the market quite extensively and the R700 offers the best bang for your buck of any 17 inch desktop replacement. You'll be surprised by how thin it feels too. Get the newer version with 2.0 Ghz Core 2 Duo and the slightly superior Nvidea 8600M GT 256mb graphics. Hence a spot of 3D gaming is absolutely doable on this machine - the graphics card is a mid range one but it will support Direct X 10. (Also came with 3GB of system RAM which is a must).Also impressive is the fact that this machine seems silent - no fan noise and seems to run very cool - I've had it mutlitasking with a 3D game + office + Macromedia studio running with no overheating.Last strong point is the inclusion of HDMI output - providing at least some HD future proofing. Overall absolutely delighted with this machine.

I challenge anyone to find a better spec, better built and better performing 17 inch notebook for the money. I was so impressed I went back to laptopsdirect and bought another one just the same for my co-director.

Just bought the Samsung R700 laptop for just over £550 which is not too bad for a new laptop, I have never owned a Samsung Laptop before but have been recommended them due to build quality and high resolution for example 2rms with the Samsung monitor I have. So bought the R700 anyway, great price I thought, have owned it now 8 days and absolutely love it, the feel of it is so cool, feel really well structured and tight, yet not heavy at all... Cant fault the design, looks cool, not over the top but as I have said feels very well built with the buttons and so on, really cant fault this. The high resolution of the screen was what I was expecting, not quite as good as my 2rms for my PC, but still very responsive... I personally dont use my laptops for anything major for example gaming, and Im not sure this laptop could take new games, as most cant in my opinion. But, for the price this is the best laptop I have ever bought and I well recommend the Samsung R700.