Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

Let's start off with the merchant was fine. It was well packaged and arrived in about a week. I own an MSI GE62 6QD Apache Pro with an NVIDIA GTX 960M graphics card, 128ssd 1 TBHDD i7-6700HQ 2.6 GHz. It's a great machine and I love it. But with the whole work from home thing, I screwed up and for the first time since the dawn of laptops, I toppled mine and cracked the screen. I figure, hey, it's four years old, I should get a new one and use the old one as a back up when I replace the screen. The MSI GP65 Leopard 10SEK-048 is a major disappointment. The cons: The AC cord connects in the center of the the side, not in the back of the side. I have enough trouble with cables being in my way and this is ALWAYS in the way. 2 USB ports are on the very front of the side on the right. Again, who wants a cable right where your right hand is reaching for a drink? Much less 2? If you don't use many USB peripherals, this may not be an issue for you. Less than an hour of battery life. How does this even make sense for a notebook? No matter what you are doing, even on the lowest brightness and saver setting. LESS than an hour. My four year old GE62 gets 2.5 hours still. Sleep? Good luck with that. On sleep, even with the lid closed, mine wakes up every three hours and cycles through something, then goes back to sleep. Don't leave it unplugged and think sleep will do you any good at all. The camera. I don't understand it. Maybe its because the screen is sharper, but the quality of the camera appears far worse than my GE62. The speakers. Really not worth much at all. Even plugging the laptop into a 32" TV with an HDMI cable didn't help the sound much. It was quite sad. The Pros Pretty keys, if you like colors Sharp screen for watching your less than an hour of video or playing your less than an hour of games or conversing with anyone on Zoom or Skype for less than an hour. Unless you don't want to be mobile and just want to plug in your power cable. Fast. There is no denying the speed. Multi tasks well. I am a person who keeps several things going at a time. Excel is a notorious memory thief and I am famous for having dozens of massive spreadsheets open and working, along with Netflix, Photoshop, image editing programs, and maybe running a game on the side. It doesn't affect the performance of this machine at all. Much as I wanted to love this machine, I'm barely able to use it at all. It's useless as a notebook, has a terrible design for the power cord and USB ports, is a disappointment in so many basic ways. But the deal breaker is the lack of battery life. What is the point of a notebook where you can't take it mobile? If all you want is a processor and a graphics card to plug monitors into for game play, there are better choices out there. Update 2020-5-1: Through no help of the (admittedly very nice) help desk, I finally found a way to extend the battery life on my personal computer (no guarantees it will help anyone else). I shut down the Dragon Center completely. With Dragon Center up, I get 1 hour and 18 minutes of browsing time, doing absolutely nothing else. By opening task manager and completely ending the Dragon Center task, so it isn't running in the background, I increased my battery time to 4 hours of browsing time. At first I thought it might be my keys so I set it to Super Battery (which turns off the lighted keys). Did not help. So I checked to see what was affecting my battery life. Dragon Center appeared at the top. Shutting down Dragon center reset the battery life to nearly five hours, but I only got four hours out of it (I shut it down before it died, so maybe four hours and 15 minutes). This is light browsing: Amazon, eBay, reading articles, posting on couple of forums. Nothing that takes any real CPU processing power or RAM. Will update again once I have recharged and run the battery through some real work but wanted to post this in case anyone else had this issue and it could help.