MSI C Series CX61 0NF-257US 15.6-Inch Laptop (Brown) Reviews

Customer Ratings:

I have had this laptop for over a week now and so far I'm pretty impressed with it. I wasn't too impressed with Windows 8 at the start, but now that I've used it for a while I'm starting to like it. Not as much as I liked Windows 7 though. There is very little bloatware pre-installed which is definitely a plus. Norton Internet Security 60 Trial is pre-installed on this system, however I urge you to uninstall it. Norton started causing issues with Windows update and the Microsoft Techs I was speaking to didn't recommend Norton whatsoever. MSi included a couple different utilities one of which is for burning recovery disks, since they aren't included in the box. You do however get a drivers and utilities disk should you need to reinstall the drivers or the included utilities.

The specs in this laptop at this price point are pretty good. The Intel i5 3210m 2.5Ghz is far better than the old Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2Ghz I was working with before. For $100 more though you can upgrade to an i7 3630QM 2.4Ghz. I kind of wish I had upgraded to an i7 but I plan on building a desktop PC later on this year so I'll save my money and put it towards that instead. It has 6GB of DDR3 RAM installed. The laptop has two graphics cards one is the Intel HD 4000 and the other is an Nvidia GT645M 2GB DDR3 Geforce card. It supports switchable graphics and you can choose individual programs to use a specific graphics card. I'm able to play a bunch of different games and also I'm able to live stream my Xbox 360 on Twitch.tv in 720p using my HD PVR. The only thing I guess that could be better is a faster hard drive. I've had 5400rpm drives in the past and the one in this laptop is the slowest I've ever used. To be fair though the hard drive in this is a Western Digital Blue and it retails for around $65 whereas the hard drive in my previous laptop was over $100 so I guess you get what you pay for. Still the hard drive holds a lot of data (750GB) so that should be plenty enough for most users. If you really wanted to make this thing super fast you could install an SSD but I don't have the money to do that so that wasn't an option. The screen resolution is kind of low but I expected that at this price point plus I have an Asus monitor I can hook the HDMI up to if I need more screen real estate. The touchpad feels nice and is very responsive. There is even a dedicated button to disable the touchpad if you want to use a mouse instead. I've never used a chiclet style keyboard before, but I don't think I would ever go back to a non-chiclet keyboard after using this. Not to mention it has a full number pad on the right for those who use those. I've usually only seen number pads on 17.3" laptops so that is a nice addition. Also a neat feature I didn't know about is the two USB 3.0 ports are super charged, that is they can charge mobile devices such as an iPhone faster than other USB chargers out there.

As far as looks go this thing looks quite nice. I like the color a lot and the lid of the laptop looks as if it were made of metal, its not though. The laptop has a decent weight to it so it doesn't feel all that cheap.

Overall I like it a lot. The only thing that is kind of bugging me is the headphone jack is making a bunch of weird sounds (not hissing like I would expect) but rather it kind of sounds like screeching or something like that. It only seems to be really noticeable when no audio is being played and the laptop is plugged into AC. Once you start playing something and turn the volume up it pretty much disappears. I'm going to have MSi look at it after this school semester is over (I need the laptop primarily for college classes).

I will keep this review updated should anything happen.

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The laptop has a nice design and doesn't come with too much useless pre-installed garbage. I like Windows 7 a lot more than Windows 8, but it's growing on me and it's not nearly as bad as people make it out to be. I'm honestly glad I bought this product.

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pros: 645m gpu good value for the price

cons: no windows 7 option, dvd rom seems more flimsy then im use to