Good day fine people of the internet,
The very first time I heard about PCS was when I was doing some filming at Insomnia52, and when I finally got round to looking at the laptops on display, I had great first impressions of the build quality and design. I've been pondering on whether or not I should splash out on a laptop for a long time but I hadn't found a company that provided laptops to my needs. I would never touch the likes of PC world, and other places that are primarly internet based only sell pre build laptops, that didn't meet my critera. This is the first time I've ventured from a popular internet company for my computing needs, so at Insomnia52, PCS really stuck in my head when it came to laptops.
Anyway, a tax rebate came through last week, so I decided to treat myself. I made about 10 million quotes for differents specs and prices, took me a long time to decide on what I'm going to go for. But I ended up with this;
17.3" Cosmos II
Chassis & Display Cosmos Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4710MQ (2.50GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM) 8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X IMPACT 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 840M - 2.0GB DDR3 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - Hard Disk 120GB KINGSTON HYPERX 3K SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 555MB/sR | 510MB/sW)
2nd Hard Disk 1TB WD SCORPIO BLUE WD10JPVX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 8MB CACHE (5400 rpm)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 2nd/3rd HDD HARD DRIVE OPTICAL BAY CADDY (12.7mm)
Memory Card Reader Internal 9 in 1 Card Reader (MMC/RSMMC/SD: Mini, XC & HC/MS: Pro & Duo)
Thermal Paste STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Bluetooth & Wireless GIGABIT LAN & KILLER™ 1202 WIRELESS GAMING 802.11N + BLUETOOTH 4.0
Battery Cosmos Series 6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery (48.84WH)
Keyboard Language UPGRADE TO COSMOS 17" SERIES BACKLIT UK KEYBOARD
Operating System Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit w/SP1 - inc DVD & Licence
Dead Pixel Guarantee 1 Year Dead Pixel Guarantee Inc. Labour & Carriage Costs
Delivery SATURDAY DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (BEFORE 12 NOON)
£842
I will be updating this post as my experience with PCS evolves, regardless if I have the best experience, or the worst. I would just like to give the version of my experiences, to hopefully help people make the right decision on their purchases. I will also be reviewing the laptop over a couple of weeks and updating this post
Saturday 28/02/2015
The laptop was ordered around 12:50. Every single laptop I've been in contact with all my life has been painfully slow and ball ache to fix. So I'm hoping the i7, 8GB and the SSD will definitely give it the feel of the desktop performance I'm use too.
Tuesday 3/3/2015
Today my order changed to the pre-production status at about 9:15
Tuesday 10/3/2015
So after what feels like logging into my account a million and 1 times to see the status of my order, today it was still sat at the pre-production stage. I was really hoping to get the laptop this Saturday because if it doesn't come, I'd have to wait another full week regardless if it had been built and ready to ship because I need Saturday only delivery.
I used the online chat tool to see if I could get an idea as to which Saturday it was likely to be out for delivery. After asking the question and a 5 minute wait I got confirmation that the laptop will be delivered this coming Saturday (14/3/2015).
So now I'm going to be like a child waking up on Christmas morning, but in the middle of march! About two hours later (14:30ish) the status of my order clicked over to 'building'. Leon Rose, you better be kind to that laptop
So far I'm really chuffed with the service I've received from PCS, the chap I spoke to was very clear, personality, and polite, there is nothing worse than speaking to someone that is clearly a script reader!
Saturday 14/03/2015
I woke up this morning at about 6:15am and my head was killing from the silly amount of alcohol I had consumed the night before, but the first thing I thought about was checking my DPD tracking page... oh and a cup of tea!
I got the 4th delivery slot of the day and the laptop arrived at about 8:45. The cat was extremely curious, as usual
The Packaging
The packing was of good standard and the tape had a lot of warnings on saying that the cargo was of the sensitive kind. One thing I did find amusing though is the chinese bought laptop box with the extremely generic phrase on Good job on that money saver, quite clever (No sarcasm there at all).
Overall, very impressed with the packaging. From the outside box all the way down to the the cover that is on the top of the laptop.
First Impressions
The laptop feels solid, well built and can't see any immediate problems, that I can see. The laptop has the macbook style keys and with all this typing I've not experienced any problems with it. I had read somewhere that the Cosmos II 17.3" had a full metal body and plastic screen, but in actual fact the whole laptop is plastic. I don't mind though. When I first turned the laptop on and did the first time set up for windows I already had a very good impression. The laptop was snappy, literally no wait times at all. It did what it was told when I told it too The SSD I chose seems to be living up to my expectations.
Sunday 15/03/2014
So I'm going to list the problems so far with the laptop, although I'm not sure you can call them problems because they are quite trivial.
GPU
When I tried to boot up my first game to see how the laptop ran, the laptop wasn't choosing the 840M for its graphics processing, instead it seemed to prefer the Intel HD. So made a little mistake, I ventured over to the device manager and disabled intel HD. BOOM, black screen. I literally can't do bugger all with my laptop. So off with the cover and out comes the battery for a minute.
So after putting the battery back in and the cover back on, I press the power button and obviously taking the battery out has completely reset the bios so my laptop couldn't boot. I had to turn off UEFI to get the laptop to boot. So after finally getting the laptop to load up windows and I go through allsorts of trouble with website certificates, but I got there in the end. All is working fine.
I try again to boot up a game and this time the laptop has chosen the 840M to process all of those lovely pixels. Woo, it's working. although when I go into PC wizard it is still showing that the Intel HD is it's primary GPU. But meh, I don't mind as long as it uses the 840M when I try to game.
Trackpad
The trackpad actually feels quite nice, although I am sometimes finding myself quite frustated with it. It may be because I'm not used to using it.
The two point gesture to scroll down pages is an awesome little feature, reminds me of using a macbook But with that gesture in place I'm not sure why you need the scroll zone of the right of the track pad. I mean, the track pad is big enough so it isn't like I find myself in that zone very often.
I have had two moments where the mouse just wouldn't move, it's as if the software had a little moment and then recovered allowing me to use the trackpad again. It has only been for a couple of seconds each time, so it's not a big issue at all and is probably me just being picky
One last minor issue I have is that because the two buttons for the left and right click is the whole pad, sometimes when I left click, it misclicks and right clicks on me and vice versa.
Sound
Will never really use the laptop speakers for anything apart from the odd youtube video. The only gripe I currently have is to use the speakers and I have to go into Control panel and set the speakers as default to use them, but whilst they are on as default the headphone socket doesn't work at all. Normally, my PC for example detects if something is plugged into the headphone socket and uses that socket to output sount and if nothing is plugged in, it outputs sound through the default port.
There is probably some setting I need to change to get it working like that I'm sure, but I've not found anything yet.
The good
The things listed above are tiny issues. They have barely made a dent in my impression of this laptop so far. It is by far the best laptop I've ever experienced, albeit the limited experience I've had. From pressing the power button to being ready to use is an amount of time that I can't measure (A little exaggerated ;]) I've had Sony Vegas Pro, Google Sketchup Pro, firefox, spotify and tixati all running at the same time with no slow down, unless of course I start rendering a video, at which point I use my main PC for that anyway.
I've literally had no problems with this laptop at all.
The very first time I heard about PCS was when I was doing some filming at Insomnia52, and when I finally got round to looking at the laptops on display, I had great first impressions of the build quality and design. I've been pondering on whether or not I should splash out on a laptop for a long time but I hadn't found a company that provided laptops to my needs. I would never touch the likes of PC world, and other places that are primarly internet based only sell pre build laptops, that didn't meet my critera. This is the first time I've ventured from a popular internet company for my computing needs, so at Insomnia52, PCS really stuck in my head when it came to laptops.
Anyway, a tax rebate came through last week, so I decided to treat myself. I made about 10 million quotes for differents specs and prices, took me a long time to decide on what I'm going to go for. But I ended up with this;
17.3" Cosmos II
Chassis & Display Cosmos Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-4710MQ (2.50GHz) 6MB
Memory (RAM) 8GB KINGSTON HYPER-X IMPACT 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 (1 x 8GB)
Graphics Card NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 840M - 2.0GB DDR3 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
Memory - Hard Disk 120GB KINGSTON HYPERX 3K SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 555MB/sR | 510MB/sW)
2nd Hard Disk 1TB WD SCORPIO BLUE WD10JPVX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 8MB CACHE (5400 rpm)
DVD/BLU-RAY Drive 2nd/3rd HDD HARD DRIVE OPTICAL BAY CADDY (12.7mm)
Memory Card Reader Internal 9 in 1 Card Reader (MMC/RSMMC/SD: Mini, XC & HC/MS: Pro & Duo)
Thermal Paste STANDARD THERMAL PASTE FOR SUFFICIENT COOLING
Sound Card Intel 2 Channel High Definition Audio + MIC/Headphone Jack
Bluetooth & Wireless GIGABIT LAN & KILLER™ 1202 WIRELESS GAMING 802.11N + BLUETOOTH 4.0
Battery Cosmos Series 6 Cell Lithium Ion Battery (48.84WH)
Keyboard Language UPGRADE TO COSMOS 17" SERIES BACKLIT UK KEYBOARD
Operating System Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit w/SP1 - inc DVD & Licence
Dead Pixel Guarantee 1 Year Dead Pixel Guarantee Inc. Labour & Carriage Costs
Delivery SATURDAY DELIVERY TO UK MAINLAND (BEFORE 12 NOON)
£842
I will be updating this post as my experience with PCS evolves, regardless if I have the best experience, or the worst. I would just like to give the version of my experiences, to hopefully help people make the right decision on their purchases. I will also be reviewing the laptop over a couple of weeks and updating this post
Saturday 28/02/2015
The laptop was ordered around 12:50. Every single laptop I've been in contact with all my life has been painfully slow and ball ache to fix. So I'm hoping the i7, 8GB and the SSD will definitely give it the feel of the desktop performance I'm use too.
Tuesday 3/3/2015
Today my order changed to the pre-production status at about 9:15
Tuesday 10/3/2015
So after what feels like logging into my account a million and 1 times to see the status of my order, today it was still sat at the pre-production stage. I was really hoping to get the laptop this Saturday because if it doesn't come, I'd have to wait another full week regardless if it had been built and ready to ship because I need Saturday only delivery.
I used the online chat tool to see if I could get an idea as to which Saturday it was likely to be out for delivery. After asking the question and a 5 minute wait I got confirmation that the laptop will be delivered this coming Saturday (14/3/2015).
So now I'm going to be like a child waking up on Christmas morning, but in the middle of march! About two hours later (14:30ish) the status of my order clicked over to 'building'. Leon Rose, you better be kind to that laptop
So far I'm really chuffed with the service I've received from PCS, the chap I spoke to was very clear, personality, and polite, there is nothing worse than speaking to someone that is clearly a script reader!
Saturday 14/03/2015
I woke up this morning at about 6:15am and my head was killing from the silly amount of alcohol I had consumed the night before, but the first thing I thought about was checking my DPD tracking page... oh and a cup of tea!
I got the 4th delivery slot of the day and the laptop arrived at about 8:45. The cat was extremely curious, as usual
The Packaging
The packing was of good standard and the tape had a lot of warnings on saying that the cargo was of the sensitive kind. One thing I did find amusing though is the chinese bought laptop box with the extremely generic phrase on
Good job on that money saver, quite clever (No sarcasm there at all).Overall, very impressed with the packaging. From the outside box all the way down to the the cover that is on the top of the laptop.
First Impressions
The laptop feels solid, well built and can't see any immediate problems, that I can see. The laptop has the macbook style keys and with all this typing I've not experienced any problems with it. I had read somewhere that the Cosmos II 17.3" had a full metal body and plastic screen, but in actual fact the whole laptop is plastic. I don't mind though. When I first turned the laptop on and did the first time set up for windows I already had a very good impression. The laptop was snappy, literally no wait times at all. It did what it was told when I told it too
The SSD I chose seems to be living up to my expectations.Sunday 15/03/2014
So I'm going to list the problems so far with the laptop, although I'm not sure you can call them problems because they are quite trivial.
GPU
When I tried to boot up my first game to see how the laptop ran, the laptop wasn't choosing the 840M for its graphics processing, instead it seemed to prefer the Intel HD. So made a little mistake, I ventured over to the device manager and disabled intel HD. BOOM, black screen. I literally can't do bugger all with my laptop. So off with the cover and out comes the battery for a minute.
So after putting the battery back in and the cover back on, I press the power button and obviously taking the battery out has completely reset the bios so my laptop couldn't boot. I had to turn off UEFI to get the laptop to boot. So after finally getting the laptop to load up windows and I go through allsorts of trouble with website certificates, but I got there in the end. All is working fine.
I try again to boot up a game and this time the laptop has chosen the 840M to process all of those lovely pixels. Woo, it's working. although when I go into PC wizard it is still showing that the Intel HD is it's primary GPU. But meh, I don't mind as long as it uses the 840M when I try to game.
Trackpad
The trackpad actually feels quite nice, although I am sometimes finding myself quite frustated with it. It may be because I'm not used to using it.
The two point gesture to scroll down pages is an awesome little feature, reminds me of using a macbook
But with that gesture in place I'm not sure why you need the scroll zone of the right of the track pad. I mean, the track pad is big enough so it isn't like I find myself in that zone very often.I have had two moments where the mouse just wouldn't move, it's as if the software had a little moment and then recovered allowing me to use the trackpad again. It has only been for a couple of seconds each time, so it's not a big issue at all and is probably me just being picky
One last minor issue I have is that because the two buttons for the left and right click is the whole pad, sometimes when I left click, it misclicks and right clicks on me and vice versa.
Sound
Will never really use the laptop speakers for anything apart from the odd youtube video. The only gripe I currently have is to use the speakers and I have to go into Control panel and set the speakers as default to use them, but whilst they are on as default the headphone socket doesn't work at all. Normally, my PC for example detects if something is plugged into the headphone socket and uses that socket to output sount and if nothing is plugged in, it outputs sound through the default port.
There is probably some setting I need to change to get it working like that I'm sure, but I've not found anything yet.
The good
The things listed above are tiny issues. They have barely made a dent in my impression of this laptop so far. It is by far the best laptop I've ever experienced, albeit the limited experience I've had. From pressing the power button to being ready to use is an amount of time that I can't measure
(A little exaggerated ;]) I've had Sony Vegas Pro, Google Sketchup Pro, firefox, spotify and tixati all running at the same time with no slow down, unless of course I start rendering a video, at which point I use my main PC for that anyway.I've literally had no problems with this laptop at all.
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