"Samsung’s RF711 is an affordable and stylish multimedia powerhouse that’s stuffed with features and connectivity yet is held back by an average screen and speakers, not to mention battery life that can be measured in minutes rather than hours under intensive workloads. However, if you want its quad-core power, don’t mind its weaknesses and your budget won’t stretch to pricier rivals, it’s definitely worth considering." - TrustedReviews.com

It was supposedly faulty but I knew nothing more than this, plus it lacked a charger so I had to gamble on the cost of one of those before I could try it out.

When I was finally able to plug it in I got it to switch on and it proceeded to boot into Windows 7, although this took a long time as if had previously lost power during a major update and it was trying to sort itself out. It got there in the end though.

Due to the problematic initial startup I was sceptical about the condition of the hard drive and sure enough a scan of the main drive with HD Tune revealed a bad sector or two.

Also, the battery (not original) is flat and holds no charge.

Reinstalling

The system evidently had its original install (something that I always like to see, even if this includes a lot of bloat) and this included Samsung's recovery tools. However, because I needed to replace the hard drive (both because it was showing signs of failing and I would prefer to use an SSD for the main drive), I needed to somehow reinstall to a new drive, but this was something the recovery tools didn't cater for (even though the system could house two drives); there was also no option to create recovery discs. Therefore I elected to install Windows 7 afresh using a standard disc and tackle the driver/software issue myself after.

The recovery tools had enabled me to create a copy of the original software and driver installs onto the second hard drive so I was hopeful I would be able to get the system setup and running like new, albeit on a SSD instead. However, I ran into two problems:

1) The install process couldn't install the Samsung Recovery Solution 5 software due to the lack of original recovery partition:

"There is no Samsung Recovery area on your hard disk drive [or SSD... that I recognize]."
...and yes, there are 36 items to install.

2) The system crashed upon reboot:

IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL... STOP: 0x0000000A
(aka: "you need Windows 7 with SP1")

I tried to combat the first issue by manually creating the original recovery partition by connecting the SSD and original hard drive up to a Linux system - more on this in a moment.

It took me a lot* of trial and error to determine that the system was crashing upon reboot due to the display drivers:

*I tackled the problem with the "divide and conquer" approach, trying one column to install at a time;
fortunately the problem was number 4/5 on the list of 36 items.

If I omitted these graphics drivers then the system would reboot fine, but as soon as I installed them and restarted it would crash and I'd have to start from scratch - I even tried Intel and Nvidia drivers I had downloaded. This all turned out to be all my own doing: the Windows 7 disc I had been using lacked Service Pack 1 (SP1)... as soon as I installed that, all worked. Except for the Recovery Tools; I still can't get that to accept my manually created partition which I did using these instructions pieced together with the assistance of ChatGPT for the sudo command:

One way around the lack of fully functioning recovery tools might be to clone the original hard drive to a replacement drive, but I suspect that might be problematic since I'm using a 240GB SSD and the original hard drive is 500GB.
 

Windows 7 & Future Plans

I've become very fond of the aesthetics of Windows 7 lately (I like Vista too); Samsung even mirror them here on this system in places such as with its original recovery partition:

Pressing F4 at startup would land you here originally.
(What will be seen can never be unseen...)

It seems a shame therefore to replace Windows 7 with something else. The previous owner also had Microsoft Office 2010 installed which sits beautifully within the operating system's styling (kind of like Windows XP and Office XP/2002) - not that I have much need for Microsoft Office.

Due to the system's GeForce graphics card, while not on par with a modern gaming laptop, it would surely be capable of "period correct" gaming, but I'm not into gaming... although I might be tempted to find something to play on it. What about video editing? I could perhaps install an old version of DaVinci Resolve (12-16; the internet is vague on this) and do some simple vlog editing rather than use my main editing rig that is an i7 desktop with Windows 10. I could dual boot the system with Linux, or use a Windows 7 theme.

The Blu-ray drive is something new to me as I've never had access to one, although it seems odd that the screen's resolution is 1600x900 when Blu-ray operates at 1080. Of course I could connect up a screen to the HDMI port. Either way, for now I have thrown some more money at ebay (I also sourced a replacement battery) and expect to take delivery of a few Blu-ray movies in the coming days. High resolutions (yes, I'm talking to those in the "everything needs to be in 4K" club) are all a load of nonsense to me, especially for anything less than some action-packed epic.

As a side-note; the sound sounded disappointing from the original install but it seems to be improved upon (successful) reinstall - perhaps the previous owner was using some odd sound profile, although I'm still not convinced the built-in speakers are anything to sing about.