Delivery was taken at around 11:30 Friday morning, well packaged and as expected. It's worth mentioning that I found the whole sales experience to be one of the best I've had, from the selection of parts available and the ease of use of the configurator right through to the tracking system and the updated turnaround time tables.
After an afternoon of setting up a dual boot system, enrolling my finger prints and doing windows updates ect I was about to start the fun and install my Traktor DJ software and contoller when I ran into a little snag.
I'd moved the laptop from the living room table into the music room upstairs and upon pressing the power on button was met with the power light and the blutooth light, a bit of fan noise and nothing else. Within about 10 seconds the laptop powered itself down again. After a few attempts with the same results I was back on the pcspecialist website on my girlfreinds laptop to contact support. Again I can't praise the support options available enough. The online live chat and the ability to see the call centre wait times particularly stood out to me against most other companies I've previously dealt with. Anyway after a short wait on the phone I spoke to a helpful member of the team and went through several possibly solutions including reseating the RAM. Unfortunately none worked and along with an apology was told to raise an RMA request. I'm sure many of you can appreciate the pain I was feeling at that point. Before doing this I tried reseating the RAM another time and my new pride and joy sprang back to life. I'm going to keep an eye on it for the next couple of weeks and if the issue crops up again I'll go through the returns process. Judging by the service I've received so far I imagine this to be as hassle free as it could be.
Once life had been restored I was able to transfer my music files over, install Traktor, install my contoller and was rocking away within 30 minutes. While I probably have more power than I need to run the software without a hitch I was still expecting to have to make some tweaks to prevent resource spikes that interfere or interupt the audio processing stream but this wasn't the case at all running at a buffer size of 128 samples acheiving a latency of 7.5ms. Later in the week I'll make the tweaks and see if I'm able to reduce the buffer size for even lower latency.
After a few hours goofing around on Traktor I had to cut my playtime short and go out for the evening - this lead to a nasty hangover and I'm only just in a condition where I can now put it through it's paces for gaming. I haven't got anything that will be mega demanding as I'm not really the FPS type but I have just purchased a copy of Shogun Total War 2 so as soon as I hit post I'll be installing that and taking over fuedal Japan.
I'll let you know how it goes and if I run into any more issues, I'm also finding my feet in Windows 7 as I've been an XP user up until now so I may be back with some stupid questions.
Let the good times roll!
After an afternoon of setting up a dual boot system, enrolling my finger prints and doing windows updates ect I was about to start the fun and install my Traktor DJ software and contoller when I ran into a little snag.
I'd moved the laptop from the living room table into the music room upstairs and upon pressing the power on button was met with the power light and the blutooth light, a bit of fan noise and nothing else. Within about 10 seconds the laptop powered itself down again. After a few attempts with the same results I was back on the pcspecialist website on my girlfreinds laptop to contact support. Again I can't praise the support options available enough. The online live chat and the ability to see the call centre wait times particularly stood out to me against most other companies I've previously dealt with. Anyway after a short wait on the phone I spoke to a helpful member of the team and went through several possibly solutions including reseating the RAM. Unfortunately none worked and along with an apology was told to raise an RMA request. I'm sure many of you can appreciate the pain I was feeling at that point. Before doing this I tried reseating the RAM another time and my new pride and joy sprang back to life. I'm going to keep an eye on it for the next couple of weeks and if the issue crops up again I'll go through the returns process. Judging by the service I've received so far I imagine this to be as hassle free as it could be.
Once life had been restored I was able to transfer my music files over, install Traktor, install my contoller and was rocking away within 30 minutes. While I probably have more power than I need to run the software without a hitch I was still expecting to have to make some tweaks to prevent resource spikes that interfere or interupt the audio processing stream but this wasn't the case at all running at a buffer size of 128 samples acheiving a latency of 7.5ms. Later in the week I'll make the tweaks and see if I'm able to reduce the buffer size for even lower latency.
After a few hours goofing around on Traktor I had to cut my playtime short and go out for the evening - this lead to a nasty hangover and I'm only just in a condition where I can now put it through it's paces for gaming. I haven't got anything that will be mega demanding as I'm not really the FPS type but I have just purchased a copy of Shogun Total War 2 so as soon as I hit post I'll be installing that and taking over fuedal Japan.
I'll let you know how it goes and if I run into any more issues, I'm also finding my feet in Windows 7 as I've been an XP user up until now so I may be back with some stupid questions.
Let the good times roll!
