Cosmos IV Review

[Scottyboy99]

I opted for the dual core i3 2.7 ghz with 8 gb ram and 940m and storage seagate hybrid 1 tb hard drive. To be honest I am disappointed but I don't think that can be levied at PC specialist. The hardware is only as good as the software it runs and Windows 10 is a nightmare. It has sucked any enjoyment out of computing. One of the most frustrating, buggy OS ever had displeasure to use (how I pine for good old Windows 7). The laptop itself is nice, it's underwhelming but coming from an Alienware laptop which was way too big and bright lights I find the change and aesthetic look of the cosmos refreshing. It's lightweight but feels sturdy. Performance is ok, my machine isn't high spec so it's no surprise. It's not much of a gaming machine but then I have a hugely powerful desktop for that. The cosmos allows us mobility to use the PC around the house which is something we never had. Yes we have the iOS devices for mobility but you still can't beat a PC for best browsing experience. THE BIG DISSAPOINTMENT though is the seagate hybrid drive. I think 8 gb flash storage is way too low and I don't really think it makes the laptop feel fast at all. It's somewhere between an SSD and mechanical drive but on a full restart I think it still boots a bit too slow despite the SSD portion of the momentous learning your habits. Don't get me wrong it's better than mechanical drive but it's left me underwhelmed. I thought it wpuld of been a good cost effective compromise as I tried to keep budget below £600. I guess compared to our desktop it will always suffer as it just feels so much less capable.

I give it a 7 out of 10. The good : lightweight, sturdy, looks very nice in an understated way. The bad: the seagate hybrid drive, it's just not that fast. The very bad : Windows 10 but that's not PC specialists fault!

 

[Scottyboy99]

Sorry about the pics. I attached them using iOS device. God knows why they came out upside down as in my camera roll they look all correct!

 

[SpyderTracks]

I have to agree with you about the seagate hybrid drives, had one on my old laptop and it doesn't really offer too much improvement over a wd caviar black imho. Went full out on ssd's since then and wouldn't go back.

Good review.

 

[Scottyboy99]

Thanks. Yes my desktop has the Samsung evo 500 gb. It's amazing. There is no way could go back to mechanical after this. I just expected more from the seagate. On my old Alienware it was mechanical hard drive and despite a high spec (back in 2011) it was so slow to boot and warm up. I installed a OCZ synapse cache SSD in it and it made a world of difference. It did have 64 gb cache available to supplement the mechanical drive but it was much better than the seagate. Only thing was it was very prone to buggering up the OS, one unclean shutdown and the dataplex software that made the magic happen could really screw things up. In my 4 years ownership I had restore images several times. So the seagate implementation is more reliable, I had one forced shutdown and the hard drive didn't bat an eyelid - so I guess it's reliable in the way it caches your data but just not as quick as I thought it'd be. I expected it be akin to the synapse cache SSD but I'd say it's a few notches below it in terms of speed

I would of preferred to grab a proper SSD plus a 1 tb storage HD but it was tough keeping it under £600. Plus I didn't want a small SSD boot drive as its too much micro management keeping it from getting filled up. As this is going to be our family machine I wanted a turnkey solution for my non techie wife and children. So the fact the seagate is just listed as one drive with no partitioning appealed. It just could do with a bit more speed. I think maybe the 8 gb flash is too small as the data changes too much whereas at least 32 gb would of worked much better.

 

[Scottyboy99]

update - ran left 4 dead 2 on it today. First attempt at a game on it. Suitably impressed. It's prob not super demanding but it seemed very fluid at 1080p. Am not expecting the latest titles to be playable unless really scaling back but this is an unexpected boost!

 

[Scottyboy99]

Update - having owned the laptop nearly 3 weeks there is a horrible problem. Don't know whether to blame MS or it's something to do with the build setup as this issue has niggled since day 1.

We have the cosmos laptop and another PC specialist desktop in our family. Both win 10 and family accounts setup with myself as head of family/admin. The setup is identical for both our machines. On our desktop everything is fine. But the cosmos laptop has a real weird issue. Every 24 hours on all (verified) user accounts we have major issues using any MS account related stuff. Logging in is quick but if we go to Cortana interests show as unavailable, ms store is very slow to load, settings - family account will show red text and unavailable right now, using IE11 or edge to login to outlook.com can take ages just to look at email, films and tv app reports can't sign in etc. And it has this problem for all of us, as if this ms stuff does not think we are connected to the Internet - but we are and in this time we can use the various browsers and happily use internet just fine unless it relates to an ms login! It's real frustrating but if I leave the laptop alone anywhere from 10-30 minutes the problem will go away and all will be fine until another 24 hours pass and it happens again. It makes me wonder if some background reconciliation happens with MS every 24 hours and I am hitting real lousy server at MS. I am at a total loss as to why this is happening and as mentioned our desktop exhibits no such issue. Both machines have very similar software on them (if anything the desktop has more such as games etc).
the issue is worst for our son who has to wait a long time for IE or edge to become useable for any site. Presumably as family tracking is trying to kick in and the browsers cannot reach MS server easily. He has to use Mozilla which functions fine whilst he waits! i have deleted the user accounts and recreated them several times but this issue persists so it shows the user accounts themselves are not corrupted
it seems to me the MS servers my laptop is locked into are just plain unreliable. But I wonder if other cosmos users have run into same issue and it's a configuration issue based on PC specialist setup. Or even the seagate momentous to blame - bad caching that is unsuited to handling multiple ms accounts