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welcome to my unboxing and first look at a very unique notebook design now you

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can see that instead of going with a more traditional LCD display they've

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gone with a dog face for the leap frog SC no I'm just kidding we have an actual

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notebook to check out this is the Gigabyte U

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2442 and there is a rhyme and reason behind that naming scheme but it's

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probably more complicated than is worth going into this is a thin and light

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notebook that is aimed at sort of your your traveling professional that still

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wants decent performance because rather than using an ultra low voltage chip uh

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Gigabyte has opted for a an SV chip so

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the actual one here can go up to 3.2 GHz it's the

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3230m they've got a 14in 1600x 900

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display and a little bit of Graphics horsepower to actually go behind it so

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it uses a gt730 instead of the what it what would

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normally be used with a thin and light notebook which is the Intel onboard

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Graphics in terms of accessories we've got a little Gigabyte carrying case

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which is sort of a a fake leather

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material and then it has two velcro pieces here as well as kind of a

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microfiber inside there's also a thing of do not eat inside so you can go ahead

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and put your notebook in there in order to carry it around it also comes with a

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pretty standard looking power brick so here's my traditional phone size

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comparison there's an HTC1 next to it uh normally I'd expect to be see a bit of a

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smaller power brick for a thin and light but part of that could be the fact that

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Gigabyte's gone with a higher performance CPU as well as a GPU uh the

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utility driver disc you probably won't need because they've implemented a

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pretty cool functionality that allows you to uh access the BIOS as well as

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recovery options for the notebook simply by pressing um a particular hotkey when

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you're in the oh look at that they include a uh they include a cleaning

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cloth so rather than including a a throwaway piece of paper inside here

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they include what's actually a fairly nice screen cleaning cloth that's a

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that's a nice TCH um anyway so there's uh there's one of

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the function keys we we'll be able to access that through the BIOS which is

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kind of cool so there we go 14-in LED backlit screen nice and thin let's do

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some more phone size comparisons just so that you guys have some idea what we're

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talking about they've got made in Taiwan branding all over it those of you who

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didn't know that Gigabyte makes notebooks uh this is kind of relatively

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new to North America but they have been doing them for a

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while uh they've got what actually is kind of a nice finish on the top here so

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it's uh it's a brushed Metal finish that is in kind of a a champagne color up

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here with just simple branding I mean it's it's one thing for people who

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really want a notebook that's like flashy and all that but for for me

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personally I like something that's just a little bit more plain looking it's not

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super super thin but it's also not thick by any stretch of the imagination so

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here we'll do our usual size comparison here there we go in terms of IO on the

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side this is Again part of the reason why you might it might not be as th so

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it's performance parts inside so you've got a Kensington lock headphone

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microphone Jack uh two USB 2.0 ports VGA

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out this is Handy especially if you're traveling on business um gigabit

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Ethernet so there you go see I mean it has things like an Ethernet port I still

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like to have an Ethernet port that still does mean something to me and if that

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means it has to be a little bit thicker then um I've found myself quite a few

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times with my Aspire S7 that I've been using lately wishing it had an Ethernet

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port whenever I have problems with wireless connectivity or whatever else

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uh this is a little bit unique for a notebook of this form factor as well they've got dual exhaust vents at the

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back and this is again likely because they've added more GPU horsepower than

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you'd normally have on a notebook like this with that said if you're not

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actually using the GPU it shouldn't have too much of an adverse effect on the

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battery life because it does support NVIDIA's Optimus technology which is GPU

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switching so it'll use the onboard Graphics whenever it doesn't need the

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additional horsepower and it'll use the dedicated graphics whenever it does on

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this side you've got your power in as well as HDMI USB 3 and an SD card slot

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and then we also find oh look at that it booted right up so I guess this is uh

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they actually had this ready to go as a as a demo unit so let's find out what

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all the stuff does I'm sort of curious

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oh look at that it has a textured touchpad which actually has a very very

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different feel to it it's uh it's a

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little bit cold to the touch as well this isn't what I'm normally used to

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touch pads being made out of it's kind of nice

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management tools but no sort of annoying

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like hey buy this buy this buy this um

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you know antiviruses like overly aggressive antiviruses or anything like

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that so I mean quite frankly with Microsoft Security

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Essentials um and and a lot of the free options out there I can't imagine a good

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reason to buy um antivirus these days

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and I'm sure someone's going to come out and tell me I'm wrong but there you go

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smart manager that's cool so you press this button and you can change your

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volume settings brightness power mode Let's see what kind of power modes we

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got here so custom power saver balance

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high performance okay these are just standard things so they've just made a little skin for it switching between

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monitors things like that it's nice to have a little dedicated button for it though and it closes if you press it

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again uh this is kind of neat so I'm actually going to power The Notebook down and okay okay no we'll we'll finish

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we'll finish with the actual notebook first so the uh keyboard is Led backet

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it's a chicklet keyboard and what it does is it actually dynamically adjusts

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its brightness according to the environment so it's obviously not on right now because we're filming a video

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so we actually needed some light function keys are able to put it into

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sleep turn your Wireless on and off brightness up and down switch to an

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external display more vol uh volume control as well as enabling Bluetooth

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turning on the webcam cool stuff like that um this is kind of oh right

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configuration so it uses a double antenna Wi-Fi which gigabytes claiming

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is able to achieve up to double the performance so what I'm assuming is that

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they've implemented a concurrent dual Band Wi-Fi solution which actually will

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improve performance dramatically so that's that's another that thing that's

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kind of cool to see implemented couple of cool things we did figure out how to force on the uh LED backlight so you can

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see how bright it is it's actually quite bright looks like the keys are individually lit and I did determine

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that although this particular one that I'm holding here doesn't have a 2 and 1

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half inch hard drive in it the the shell itself supports up to an MSA SSD and an

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additional 2 and 1/2 in drive so you could add a hybrid drive or uh um well

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an additional storage hard drive this one I already mentioned the 3230m

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processor as well as the 1600 by 900 LCD it's got 8 gigs of DDR3 RAM I 128 gig

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MSA SSD in this particular one 2 gigs of

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memory on that gt730m although I doubt that the extra memory will benefit you

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in any tangible way and then it supports 802.11 BGN as well as Bluetooth

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4.0 so that's your wireless and all that good stuff it supports onoff charging

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which means that even when the notebook is powered down you can charge devices

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off of it which is just kind of Handy it's one of those things that desktops been doing for a long time but hasn't

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necessarily been implemented on all notebooks and we're going to go ahead

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and use this little thing I actually kind of like that it's a neat little widget they should make it available

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like the Gigabyte shutdown widget to uh to anyone this is kind of cool so all

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these indicator LEDs over here Bluetooth Wi-Fi hard drive charging uh I don't

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know brightness check this out so see that little battery icon there if you

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right click while the computer's off ha it's a battery indicator so I checked in

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Windows and it's got about 60% battery so you can quickly check and see oh look

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at that it has just over half battery yay uh even when the notebook's off you

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can you can know how much uh battery life is left in your notebook overall

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construction is fairly plasticky uh the top feels nice but I wish that it had an

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equal sort of fit and finish to the bottom which is H which is a plastic

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shell that does have a little bit of a little bit of flex um you've got easy

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access to memory upgrades which is nice but I wish that you had easier access

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access to the 2 and 1/2 in Drive Bay I can see through these slats that that

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you don't and it looks like you'll have to remove the whole bottom of the notebook with that being said what is

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good about an approach like this is that simply by removing these screws you have

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access to the entire bottom of the notebook so if you did want to do anything with it such as uh change the

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drives whether it's the MCA drive or the hard drive itself then that would be

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fairly doable for you there's an included webcam up here and other than

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that I don't think that we have missed anything thank you for checking out my

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unboxing and first look at the u44 to D

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this particular one from Gigabyte don't forget to subscribe to L's Tech tips from unboxings reviews and other

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