Bad experience with Samsung

[speckytecky]

A school I visit took delivery of 4 Samsung NPR509 notebooks some 5 weeks ago now. Loaded the XP Pro (Upgrade or Downgrade as MS terms it) from Vista Business. Then found that the XP drivers had not been supplied. Tried Samsung web support and downloaded what looked like the relevant drivers but the LAN driver failed on restart.

Been ringing Samsung almost weekly since to try and get the correct driver disk sent. They couriered yet another set of Vista Business and XP Pro disks but failed to include the driver disk! Disk since promised but to date has not arrived.

In view of this dreadful service I'd never ever consider buying a Samsung product again.

[OutToLunch]

I had great fun with my HP 2133 netbook when that turned up and I dived straight into a downgrade from Vista... Although in theory it had XP drivers, half of them were missing/behaved oddly, the others had a non resizeable dialog box to install with an OK button that was off the bottom of the screen.

Can you not check the chipset of the LAN card and just get it directly from the OEM - Broadcom/Intel/Realtek etc?

[3s-gtech]

Bought a godwaful Toshiba tablet that came with Vista Ultimate here, which the teacher insisted on - the far superior older model had been discontinued. I ended up having to piece together drivers and software from other models on their website to try and get the thing to work with XP Tablet Edition! I know how frustrating it can be

[speckytecky]

Got the flaming things working now. Spent most of theday on it yesterday! Samsung tell me that for the XP (upgrade) downgrade to work I'd have needed drivers from a purple colourer CD - which wasn't supplied. In the end I found the relevant drivers on their WWW but the system was so tetchy they had to be appled in a certain order. When I'd got the job done a chap from Samsung called me and told me that we shouldn't have been supplied with the XP option. Nevergoing to buy a Samsung ever again!