Samsung R580

Loads of room for improvement – I purchased this laptop back in April 2010. Specs: CPU: Intel Core i5 2.4Ghz GPU: Nvidia Geforce 330M 1Gb RAM: 4GB DDR3 1066Mhz Display: 15.4" LED, 1366x768 OS: Microsoft Windows 7 home premium 32bit This laptop did pack a bit of a punch, The display had good colours and the keyboard I found to be great. The speakers though were as tinny as you can get.

I found after around 7 months things started to go down hill. I will get to this later.

While it was working properly:

This laptop ran most games at the time on a decent level of detail. The battery life was around 1.5 hours which is not bad given the performance. I really was impressed. The display was easy to see, even in areas with bright light. Apart from this there is nothing else overly positive to say unfortunately.

After 7 months:

This is when things started to go wrong. The laptop started to overheat and just turn off without warning. The CPU didn't start throttling. While this started off a problem when gaming it progressively got worse. I re installed windows and loaded all the drivers back on and was still overheating. In order for me to play a game, in this case F.E.A.R combat which is not overly demanding, I had to sit it on ice blocks. Then it started to overheat while watching movies and surfing the internet. It was pretty much useless at this stage. After turning turbo boost and HT off (Running at 1.2Ghz now) things improved for a little while.

Cleaning dust out of it is no easy task since you have to pull the whole laptop to pieces unlike my HP NC6220, on that you unclip the keyboard and it just lifts up. Everything is accessible. One of the best designs I have come across.

I cannot understand why this laptop come loaded with a 32-bit verson windows and 4GB of R.A.M. The OS cannot use the entire 4GB. So to me it seems pointless.

To me this laptop is a lemon in disguise and the good looks will lure customers like us to buy it.

So to conclude, It was a great laptop for the first 6 months but after 7... forget it. If you are going to play any games or do anything demanding I suggest you build or purchase a desktop and have an older and more reliable laptop to do less demanding tasks on. It is that bad. Sorry Samsung but the only good thing here is a lesson learned. Great potential, good looks and good keyboard. Cooling system and OS

Good – If you like style and good build quality you will love this laptop. I got it to replace a desktop. Its blistering fast. The keyboard is of the very short travel variety and this takes some getting used to. One can type very fast but the keyboard is not as tactile as an IBM keyboard is famous for. The laptop runs very quiet and cool and has a sleep and charge usb feature.

I have had to call Samsung a few times and they do not seem very switched on so I hope nothing goes wrong.

Overall I recommend this laptop as long as battery life and an IBM keyboard feel is not your priority. Very stylish, light and strong build, nicely put together, nice and bright LED backlit screen, very powerful processor and strong 1G graphics card, large hard drive Only 32 version of Windows 7. Keyboard not the most tactile, battery life not as long as I would like. Samsung support not very confidence inspiring