Fry's Surprise

april 10, 2007 : steve kong : 13 comment(s)

Ask Eileen about this, but recently, I have been looking at Fry's ads and saying: "There's no more 'wow' to Fry's ads." It has been a long time since I cracked open a Fry's ad and said, "Wow, now that is a great deal!" Saturday, there was a "wow" type ad. Fry's was selling a GQ NX-L513 notebook for $399. This notebook regularly sells for $679.99, so it was a great deal. The specs of the notebook: Not a bad deal for $399. I am going to sell off my old P3 notebook and some oddities (like phones) to make up for the cost of this notebook. GQ (aka "Great Quality") is the in-house brand for Fry's. Usually, it is just Fry's rebranding white-box hardware. In the case of the NX-L513, it is a rebranded ECS LS51II notebook. The notebook was sold as having a 40GB harddrive inside, but I found that the HDD is really a Hitachi 60GB SATA drive that has been partitioned with 40GB usable (and the other 20GB unformatted). That made the deal even sweeter. I installed Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 on the box and found that the WLAN NIC was a GIGABYTE GN-WI01GT AirCruiser G 108Mbps Mini-PCI-E Adapter. Which, kind of sucks. That WLAN NIC is in a Mini-PCI-E slot, but acts like a USB device. The chipset used for it is a Ralink chipset. Ralink is a decent company and has released drivers for Linux under GPL. Except that the drivers are written in some strange funky fashion and don't work all that well. They don't integrate well into wpa_supplicant and because of that they don't work with NetworkManager. Getting the card to come up on boot did not work for me, it took more wrangling of monkeys in the /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts directory than I liked. And when I did get things kind of setup, the dhclient requests would not get done on boot. I finally gave up and ordered an Intel 3945abg card from Amazon. That has good support in RHEL5. The nice thing about the NX-L513 is that it is pretty easy to upgrade the components. The included instruction manual outlines how to upgrade RAM, HDD and WLAN cards -- and they are very easy to do. This is the first machine I have gotten in which the manual has something about popping open the machine. Very nice. And unlike Apple notebooks, upgrades do not require four very sweaty hands, prayers and a lot of gymnastics to get to key components (like the harddrive). The box also included a restore DVD which is nice -- considering most large manufactures nowadays opt for the hidden partition on the HDD and a "burn your own damned restore disk" approach. The only problem is that I tried to restore Vista (for shits and giggles), and it didn't work. It complains that the hardware has changed -- well, duh, of course the hardware configuration changed, I repartitioned the HDD to use the full 60GB available. Oh well, not a big loss as I was not going to use Vista anyways -- especially the "shareware" Vista Basic version. The screen on the notebook is bright and has a lot of contrast. It is also really sharp. The only problem is that I would have loved to have a matte screen instead of a glossy one. The reflection in the screen is really distracting. But, hey, I can't really complain on such a good deal. I still don't understand why people like the glossy screens though. I have the Intel Pro Wireless 3945abg card installed and am ready to install RHEL5 back onto the notebook. But, redhat.com is down for maintenance right now. Doh. I will have to wait a little be before they come back - I need to log into redhat.com in order to get my installation number and get the notebook "entitled" for updates. I'm really happy with the purchase and will write a longer review later. With the addition of the Intel 3945abg card, the notebook is as close to "Centrino" as possible (it has the correct Intel 945GM chipset and WLAN card) -- it can't be called a Centrino notebook for the fact that it is running a Celeron M processor (which is really a Core Solo without SpeedStep).

Comments

redhat.com came back up 10 minutes after I posted. Installing RHEL5 now.

mookie

April 10, 2007 @ 09:23 PM

SpeedStep is for weenies. I turned it off on my PC laptop as soon as I noticed things chugging whenever I was off the AC adapter.

alice

April 10, 2007 @ 11:22 PM

Yea, who wants to run at half speed anyways?

mookie

April 11, 2007 @ 12:15 AM

RHEL5 is installed and configured (and semi-tweaked to my liking). So far, so good. The ipw3945 packages from Red Hat work perfectly with the Intel WLAN card. The system is running uber smoothly now. Although, makewhatis is sucking the life out of my CPU.

mookie

April 11, 2007 @ 12:16 AM

My wife recently found a thread at fatwallet.com with this machine, and one of the posters there linked to this blog. Would you happen to know if this machine will take XP? I have an extra licensed copy of XP, and I'd like to "downgrade" once I get the laptop, based on everything I've read about Vista (and that was before I found your site!) Thx.

Patrick

May 3, 2007 @ 08:54 PM

Patrick, To best of my knowledge, this machine will take XP. I say this because the included drivers CD that is in the box with the machine includes both Vista and XP drivers for all the components of the machine. -Mookie

mookie

May 3, 2007 @ 09:38 PM

Mookie, That's awesome. Thanks for the info.

Patrick

May 4, 2007 @ 10:17 AM

Bought one of these laptops about a month ago (one of the last ones left i think). Been pretty happy overall, but the fan noise is kind of ridiculous...gonna have to replace the fan with a double ball bearing one before i try to use this for any presentations or anything. You have to yell to be heard over the fan noise

Hans

August 2, 2007 @ 04:38 PM

Hans, you may either have a bad notebook or be really exagerating. The fan on my notebook is loud, but not as loud as you describe.

mookie

August 5, 2007 @ 09:20 PM

I bought two of these GQ NX-L513 on that fateful day when you said "Wow!" You mentioned that your CPU is being taxed by makewhatis. What do you think about upgrading the CPU to a dual core? Since the chipset is 945gm + ICHR7, and not 940, a CPU upgrade is at least physically possible, and plug and play, right? (financially possible is another matter) Also, is it possible to update the card reader built inside the L513 ? Downloading a full 2GB SD card can take 53 minutes in the laptops! Compare that to 14 minutes in the workstation. Both laptop (Vista) and workstation (XPpro) have 4GB physical ram resident, with 3.32GB reported on laptop, and 3.54 reported on workstation, and no other optional applications running. Just curious what your take is on the CPU upgrade, as well as a card reader upgrade in these laptops, which otherwise have proven themselves to be tremendous values!

Charles

September 11, 2007 @ 08:46 AM

Charles, Unless you pop open the NX-L513, you can't be sure if it is a 945gm or a 940. The manual for the ECS version of this notebook says that the chipset for Celeron M based versions is actually the 940. Also, I think there maybe a BIOS dependency if you swap chips. makewhatis only runs once in a while, so it's not a big deal that it eats up CPU for a period of time. I don't know about the card reader. As for the RAM, you lose some RAM because the RAM is shared RAM with the video subsystem. That's why you see less. -Mookie

mookie

September 11, 2007 @ 09:49 AM

Thanks for the comments Mookie. I've had one of the NX-L513s open before to upgrade the ram, but didn't look around hard enough to find out the chipset, though. But, it looks like I'm going to be cracking them open again, because just like what happened to you, my RESTORE disk doesn't work. In fact I've tried both RESTORE disks, and neither work in the laptop whose memory I upgraded. However, the RESTORE disk did work in the laptop whose memory I did not upgrade. Interesting? Based on what you wrote about changing your wifi card and repartitioning your HD to the 60GB, I'm assuming that the image on the restore disk is looking for the exact OEM configuration, including amount of ram. Yet there is something else anamalous about the laptop that won't upgrade. Even though the sticker on the Laptop says it is supposed to have a Celeron M 420 1.6 ghz, what is actually installed, and what the computer system verifies, is an M 430 at 1.73 ghz. So, even out of the box, the laptop doesn't have the original configuration, so what is a customer supposed to do? And how does one upgrade and still have access to the original OS on a bootable disc? Unlike your situation, there are no messages that appear telling me why the restore disk doesn't work. It just doesn't boot. And I've F2'ed into the bios to MAKE SURE that the CD/DVD drive is boot order #1. I've F9'ed the bios to bring everything to factory defaults. And I've F12'ed on power up, again, to make sure that the CD/DVD is first to boot. I get the text that says press any key to boot from CD, then nothing. Weird?

Charles

September 18, 2007 @ 11:01 PM

I have two of these laptops running 32bit XP Pro with 2GB, and haven't had a single problem with them except for the fan noise driving me insane. I'm going to try Notebook Hardware Control soon and see if it's ACPI interface works. I'm glad to hear from the post above that they will hold 4GB of RAM, I might upgrade that next.

Brian

November 20, 2007 @ 02:28 PM

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