I'm in! 🙂
I love that thing! I've had mine for about a month now, and couldn't be happier. It recovers from hibernation a couple of seconds slower than my old laptop recovers from standby. It's fast as hell in everything I do, and the screen is beautiful. The graphics card is a lot faster than I expected, and the dvd burner works great (though typical of laptop burners and less expensive desktop burners, it's very picky about what kind of disks it will burn movies onto withour errors).
Just a quick tip...you can use ATItool (google it) to raise the clockspeed of your GPU to 400/215 and get 26fps in Aquamark 3. Not quite 6800 specs, but good enough for anything out today. Just don't leave it that way longer than you need to (changing clock speed is a breeze with that program and can be done on the fly). I don't actually bother to overclock it when playing games, as it runs everything just fine at stock clock. I get over 40fps in the half life 2 video stress test (just leave antialiasing off). I'm not big into shooters...more RPG and RTS games, and it runs Vampire Bloodlines and Stronghold 2 with excellent framerates at the highest settings.
I haven't had a single problem with mine so far...not even a hint of one. I too got rid of everything, though I didn't format...just manually uninstalled all the junk.
As for battery life, I can squeeze out a little over three hours for stuff like word processing, a little over two and a half hours streaming tv shows over the wireless lan, and under two hours at full clock.
After you spend some time with this laptop, you will notice that it always runs at 33% CPU clock when on batteries, and changing power profiles does nothing except when on AC power. You can download aftermarket clock managers, or you can just hibernate your laptop.
If you use hibernation instead of full restarts, as soon the machine recovers from its first hibernation the power manager functions will begin to work again. Minimal power management will manage the CPU clock dynamically, max battery keeps it at 33%, and most of the others run it at full clock. You can download the powernow! dashboard from AMD's homepage to keep an eye on clock speed until you're sure it does what you want.
This is an easy workaround because there is no reason not to use hibernation. Once you see how quickly this thing turns on with it, you'll never want to do a full restart again.
