From a cold boot, the GX60 is ready to go in Windows 7 in 48 seconds - a tiny bit slower than I anticipated from a system equipped with a solid state drive, but still not terrible for Microsoft’s previous-gen OS that many hardcore users and gamers appear to prefer.
The first thing I typically do with a new PC after measuring initial boot time is head to the Add/Remove programs list and take a count of what I need to discard. MSI’s GX60 did pretty well here as there were only about 6 or so programs that I would typically get rid of. Culprits include Trend Micro Titanium Internet Security 2012, Norton Online Backup and even MSI’s own S-Bar. S-Bar is a widget that loads alongside Windows 7. It sits at the top of your desktop as a small icon that when opened, provides the user with a series of shortcuts to accomplish tasks like adjusting the volume and enabling or disabling Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or the webcam. It might be a handy tool for beginners but seasoned Windows 7 veterans will likely want to uninstall it to save resources and reduce clutter.
Benchmarks Results
The iTunes encoding tests consist of converting 14 MP3s (119MB) to 128Kbps ACC files and measuring the operation’s duration in seconds. For file transfers, we measure how long it takes to copy two sets of files from one location to another on the same hard drive. On the small files test we transfer 557 MP3s, totaling 2.56GB. For the large file, these same MP3s were zipped into a single file measuring 2.52GB.
15.6" 1920x1080 matte display AMD A10 Processor (2.3 GHz) AMD Radeon HD 7970M, 2GB discrete 8GB of DDR3 RAM 128GB SSD, 750GB HDD (7200RPM) Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
15.6" 1366x768 LED-backlit display Intel Core i5-3317U (1.7GHz - 2.6GHz) 6GB DDR3 RAM Intel HD 4000 Graphics + GeForce GT 640M LE 1GB 20GB SSD + 500GB 5400RPM HDD Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit
15.6" 1920x1080 LED-backlit display Intel Core i7-3620QM (2.6GHz - 3.8GHz, 8MB L3 cache) 8GB 1600MHz DDR3 memory Nvidia GeForce GT 650M 2GB 750GB 7200RPM hard drive Microsoft Windows 7 Professional 64-bit
