savi18 said:
Hi AllI too bought a gericom laptop from aldi in December for £799 but does have its faults, when i booted it up found 1 dead pixel and the touch pad all over the place,also the Laptop shuts off without notice, downloaded the bios for the touchpad which has improved but now and again the touchpad is still eratic, what the biggest problem is the laptop just shuts off has anyone else had this problem, i cannot send this Laptop back for repair as i now live in New Zealand(visited the UK at Xmas), warrenty does not cover away from the UK.
I bought this laptop when it came out in November 2004. Only found out today from this forum that it was reduced by £200 a few weeks later! Only wish I'd known at the time as I'd have taken it back and bought it at the lower price... :-(
I too thought there was a lot of scratches on the lid of this laptop when I bought it. After a minute or so I realised it was just a protective film though. I'm amazed to see some people actually hadn't discovered this and took it back as damaged! Shame as I'm delighted with the product.
I've not had any problems with the touch pad at all. I did however have the problem of the laptop shutting down without any notice. Drove me mad for a couple of weeks until I figured out the reason... It's very easily cured though.
If you go into the Control Panel, Power Options and look under 'Alarms', you will see that the default settings are set ridiculously high and causing the power shutdowns. I altered mine so can't remember exactly what it was now, but it was set to shutdown when the battery power came down to about 80% or more! Whoever set the defaults for the alarms wants a good slap.
Since I reset the alarms to just notify me when down to 50% and 20% (no shutdown), the machine has worked beautifully. No complaints with it whatsoever. I was a bit cheesed off to see the new laptop in last week (May 2005) at the same price I paid (£999) but with bluetooth adaptor, built in TV card etc, but after finding out the highest resolution on that model is 1280 I'm not so bothered. I use this laptop at 1400 x 1050 (I'm a website designer) and wouldn't want to use smaller now. The resolution on this laptop goes all the way up to 2048 x 1536 if I should ever require it. I've also been told that the newer laptop doesn't have such a good quality casing, which is important to me.
