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VPR Matrix 200A5 Reviewed
An anonymous reader writes "The hard to find VPR Matrix 200A5 laptop has been reviewed. Never heard of it? It's a laptop that's designed by F.A. Porsche and sold exclusively by...Best Buy! It seems there is starting to be a rather large following of the VPR line of laptops, but that they are getting tougher to find at Best Buy (not sure if they are discontinuing or if they are selling out stock before releasing a new version.)"
Slashdot had the story when these things were announced here. And no, it's not a dupe, this is a review.
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
I read somewhere that WorstBuy is dropping the whole vprMatrix line. Probably explains why I was able to get the 17" LCD monitor for $300 after rebate. I've been trying to buy another LCD for the past two months and can't find them. In fact, the store doesn't seem to have much vprMatrix stuff at all.
These look nice and have nice spec/feature sheets, but have had some trouble with reliability. The Best Buy computer guy told me that genuine failure returns are running around 10%. They run _very_ hot, even for a laptop, to the point where I think it would be uncomfortable to have it on your lap for an extended period of time.
Then after 8 hours of hair pulling and cursing, it turns out it has an ALi chipset. Not Soundblaster Live! Oh, but that's not all folks. A few days later, I call asking for motherboard info.
Frustrating. Really frustrating. The machine itself is quite nice though. Beautiful widescreen, fast RAM, and very stylish. If there is this supposed following of vprMatrix users, I wonder if they would be of better use than tech support.
IWARS.
People, in general, disappoint me. Politicians even more so.
"Does it run Linux well?"
This Porsche and the other Porsche are from the same family, but completely different companies.
Heute die Welt, morgen das Sonnensystem!
Dr.Ing.h.c.F.Porsche AG is the German car manufacturer that has been designing and producing sports cars for over 55 years. link.
Porsche Design is a different company that does all sorts of design work, from radios to sunglasses to pens. It was split off of the car company back in the 80's, I believe.
So, Porsche Design really didn't design the 911 (the body of the car was designed by Ferdinand "Butzi" Porsche (Ferry's son) while the engine was designed by Ferdinand Piech (Dr. Porsche's nephew) in 1963).
--- witty signature
Don't laugh, but their kettle, toaster, coffee maker and citrus press are all worthy of drooling over too.
Oh, and so is the Data Bank, a FireWire external hard disk drive that they designed for LaCie, that's styled to look like a silver ingot.
I'd link directly to their kitchen accessories but their flash-based site is annoying. If you're interested in viewing them, look at them here, courtesy of Amazon.co.uk.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
F.A. Porsche (the guys who designed the 911 and some Samsung LCD monitors)
Actually, no. If you read the previous posting you would discover that this is Porsche Designs GmbH, *not* the same as the car company, nor the designers of the 911. These folks started out in 1972 (when was the 911 first on the market?) and design everything from LCDs to kitchen sinks to scooters. But sorry, no 911.
And by reading into their website a little further, they have 12-14 employees. Makes you wonder why this laptop is so shoddy...
I currently work for BB, as the lead tech at a best buy in the northern Chicago area (i'm actually typeing this while on the clock). At the moment, and from what i've been told, yes, the current line of VPR laptops are being closed out. We have carried them since before christmas, if i recall, and it the 200a5 was reviewed in Maximum PC mag. They keep saying that they are comeing out with a new line, which i hope they do, but i haven't seen nor heard anything.
It's too bad, becasue they are some REALLY nice laptops, arguably the best we carry. I haven't seen nor felt any heat issues, nor had any reliability issues with them (Sony, in my experiance, is the worst of the bunch in that catagory). I've worked with them extensivly, and i can't report any high heat issues. My only complaint was that the Northbridge, made by Ali, has absolutly horrid preformance, and in testing scored around half the memory bandwith of other comparable laptops. Also, the graphics chipset is only 32mb.
BTW, the price that a lot of places are quoteing at, and the price on the VPR website, is way off. When we still actually had an active stock, they were selling for $1600 after rebates, and when we were trying to clear them out, they went for $1350 after rebates. Good luck finding them now, though. If you can, the 180b5 was also great, pretty much the exact same thing as the 200a5, only with a 1.8 GHz proc and a 30gb hard drive, vs. the 200a5's 2GHz and 40gb.
I'm not too sure what is going on with the whole VPR thing though. I hope they are continued, they were wildy sucessful, our stores could almost never keep them in stock, desktops or laptops. We are getting a new high-end desktop in, as of 4-29-03. To my knowlage, it's the 9150, a 3GHz P4 with dual 120gb hard drives in RAID 0, and a GF4 Ti4200. So they VPRs arn't dead, i hope they are continued, but i don't know. It is nice, though, to actually carrey a quality computer, insted of selling e-machines and compaqs all day. I don't know why they would be closed out, they were wildly profitable, and customers and employees both love them.
HOWEVER, there are _quite_ a few issues with it. For one, the damn built-in NIC doesn't work 99% of the time. I have resorted to using my external PCMCIA NIC (or wireless, when it is available). Seems pretty bad to me, but mine could just be defective (or I could have just fsck'd it up testing out all those Linux drivers, heh). Also, the keyboard is VERY fragile, ugh. Keys pop off all the time -- there are 4 posts, one in each corner under every key... the bottom 2 hinge onto the board and the top two snap on... those top two break very easily. What I find questionable is the fact that Best Buy salesmen were trying to tell me the keyboard is very fragile and really used that to try to get me to buy the warranty (I didn't, but I might go back to get it, ugh). Also... (and I should've done my research on this ahead of time) it uses an Ali chipset, which I'm _not_ very fond of. Getting apm working properly is a B*TCH. (I haven't succeeded thus far)
Overall, I made a decision, and I'm stuck with it, so I guess I better be happy with the vpr Matrix 200A5. Since hindsight is 20/20, looking back, I should have waited, for pretty much all other laptop manufacturers have put out better stuff out there (though not as light or stylish) for considerably cheaper since I bought it. My original plan was to buy the 15" PowerBook, which I didn't for various reasons, so I bought the 200A5 instead. I regret it. I would've boughten the 17" PowerBook, but cost is an issue for me. My suggestion to other people? Stay away from it (if you can even find one), and get either a PowerBook instead, or if you like x86, get a Toshiba or a Compaq/HQ or whatnot. There are some very nice laptops out on the market with better hardware specs and cheaper prices. Just my $.02.
they have a shitty returns policy, and they Quality control really sux. I've had mine in 4 times. spend the extra $$ and buy a named-clone
I have the same laptop and have had terrible problems with mine. Actually, most of the problems have been with Best Buy support, but still...
Upon opening the packaging, I discovered no power supply. Back to the store I went. Several days later, keys were falling off the keyboard, and I couldn't get them to stay on. Back to the store yet again (and remember, this is Best Buy. A trip to get service necessitates at least 1 hour in line, waiting for the one guy in the service department to get around to you). Finally, a week later, I discovered that more than half of the screws had fallen out of the case. Once again, back to the store for replacements. When I got home from that service trip, I plugged in the laptop at home, only to see a curl of smoke rising lazily from the power supply connector. Needless to say, the laptop would no longer boot.
That is when the fun began. I took it back to Best Buy (4th time in 2.5 weeks!!!!) and was told that it would be fixed in 14 days. 14 days came and went. Phone calls revealed that the 'service center' had not even opened the package until the day before it was due to be back in my hands. Once service did finally open the box, they discovered, not surprisingly, a burnt out motherboard. Oops, that part has to be shipped in from overseas. Imagine that, a laptop service center that doesn't have a single spare motherboard in stock! Once again, this is Best Buy, so don't forget that each of my phone calls required at least 40 minutes of time on Hold, occasional accidental hang ups, circular redirections to multiple departments, the works.
Finally, nearly 2 full months after I had sent it in (well over 30 business days), I gave up and sent my story to the technical editor of every relevant magazine in the industry, and filed a complaint with the Better Business Bureau. The very next day, I got a call from the Best Buy service tech with tnews that the laptop was shipped that day. I imagine they just ripped teh motherboard out of a new model to avoid bad publicity.
I finally received the laptop, which I had delivered to Best Buy on 2/12, on 4/4. Meanwhile, I had been accused of taking the laptop apart myself, since it had mismatched screws in the bottom, and was told that the missing soundcard (huh? Turned out, the parts sheet the service tech was looking at was incorrect) would have to be replaced by me at a cost of about $500. THat was resolved after a bit of yelling and screaming on my part, but not before I was hung up on by one tech. I won't say I wasn't being rude, but still...
The thing is still working now, in late April, but I have still not owned it for even half as long as it has spent in service (no, I didn't do the math).
The good news is that Linux works really well on it, except for ACPI support. The nvidia drivers for the video card seem well supported in Linux with at least one update since I purchased the hunk of junk. The sound card works fine, but doesn't have ALSA drivers. The wireless card was a no brainer, but has terrible range. It can't find the linksys access point in my kitchen from my bedroom, 30 feet away, through open doors. Actually, I suspect that the tech neglected to reconnect an antennae or something. I just shove in my old wavelan card and don't worry about it for now. The wavelan ahs excellent signal strength at the same distance. I am not about to relinquish the thing for another 2 months in order to have them look at it.
Win2K support was terrible. I dumped XP both because my work required Win 2K and because I couldn't stand the way M$ took such an active interest in my registration status. Getting drivers and such to work was a royal PITA. Downloading the latest drivers from the VPR website resulted in malfunctioning everything. Reverting to the drivers from the support CD did eventually get most things up an running , and selectively applying some of the updated drivers fixed the rest.
The widescreen is great, and the slot load DVD/CD-R would be nice if it