The best value for a portable laptop. At this price, you won’t find a more powerful 12″ laptop with as good features. Also, it comes with XP instead of Vista so you don’t have to have the hassle of downgrading. But if you do want Vista, it’s not hard to upgrade and all drivers are available. At 12″ it’s quite a mobile laptop, especially w/ the 9-cell battery which lasts close to 6 hours. Even with this large battery, it’s only a little over 4lbs, which is certainly fine for travel. Great to bring to class and you don’t have to plug it in at all until you go back home. At my desk, I plug it into a larger monitor and the built in software to manage external monitors makes it very simple. It only has 1 gig of RAM and a 5400 rpm hard drive, but 5400 rpm is normal and both are easily upgraded. It’s much cheaper to upgrade these yourself than buying them already installed. The built-in speakers are pretty crappy, but all laptop speakers are and you should either be using external speakers or headphones. The edge around the screen is kind of thick, but it’s not a big deal. The construction overall seems quite sturdy.
Not Much RAM for Multitasking
The more RAM your laptop has, the faster programs will run and the greater number of windows you can work in at one time. If your needs are simple and you rarely do more than two things at once on your PC, the relatively modest amount of memory that comes installed in inexpensive laptops will be enough. Today the standard amount of RAM shipped in most PCs is 2GB. If you like to multitask–say, you want to launch a search for a file and start backing up data to a disc while you watch a news video–you need more memory.
Underpowered Video Hardware Not Suited for Serious Gamers
A video chip set (also called integrated video or Intel video) built into this laptop’s motherboard handles the graphics. Relatively speaking, this video hardware is underpowered. Since the laptop lacks a dedicated graphics card, the integrated chip set has to borrow video memory (an arrangement known as dynamic memory or shared memory) from the main system memory to make images look good. If you play only online trailers or 2D games, integrated video is fine. As long as the laptop has a fairly fast processor, such as a dual-core Intel CPU, even movies should look good and play smoothly. But laptops with integrated video can’t render 3D well and handle sophisticated effects properly. Games will skip, lose details, or stop altogether if the video hardware can’t manage at least 30 frames per second. If gaming is important to you, ante up for a laptop with a dedicated card.
Supports DVD Burning
This laptop is equipped with a DVD burner, a slightly older type of optical drive. If you don’t need the ultrahigh recording capacity of a new Blu-ray optical drive, and you don’t care about watching high-definition movies on your laptop, a DVD burner should suit you fine. It can read and burn data, music, or video discs up to 8.5GB in capacity. A DVD burner is, of course, backward-compatible with CDs, but it cannot play the newer Blu-ray media because the two types of optical-disc technology use different lasers. In a couple of years, Blu-ray will completely replace the DVD disc format.
Supports Memory Stick Cards
Usually, a multiformat card reader, such as the one in this laptop, can accept several different types of flash memory cards, including Memory Sticks. A compact proprietary flash memory card, Memory Stick is a Sony and SanDisk product intended chiefly for Sony devices, including its laptops, digital cameras, camcorders, PDAs, and cell phones, as well as the PlayStation Portable. Five variations have been released since its introduction in 1998–each faster, smaller, and more capacious than the last. Check this laptop’s specs to see how many variations of Memory Stick it can read without an adapter. Not much bigger than a thumbnail, the Memory Stick Micro (aka M2) is the one of the smallest flash memory cards in existence; only the competing microSD, a type of SD Card, is tinier. The 16GB Memory Stick Pro Duo stores the most data.
Supports xD-Picture Cards
If you own a Fujifilm or Olympus digital camera, or an Olympus digital voice recorder, this laptop might be appropriate for you since it can read the xD-Picture Card format. xD is a niche product, not as popular or ubiquitous as other types of flash memory cards. Small and thin, and about the size of a quarter, it’s comparable in size to Memory Sticks and SD Cards–but it doesn’t hold as much, topping out at a mere 2GB. If you own (or are thinking of buying) a Fujifilm or Olympus digital device and need xD compatibility, that won’t matter. This laptop will make sharing xD data a breeze.
Supports SD Cards
Like most new laptops, this one has either a multiformat card reader or a dedicated slot that accepts an SD (Secure Digital) Card. More popular than Memory Stick, CompactFlash, and xD-Picture Card, SD is found in a large number of digital cameras, PDAs, printers, and other devices. SD Cards have built-in security functions to protect data, including music copyright protection. (The cards have a small write-protection switch on the side similar to that of a floppy disk.) The latest SD card, the microSDHC, is the tiniest flash memory card to date, measuring only 11mm across. It’s also the fastest and roomiest, capable of holding up to 16GB of data.
Supports MultiMediaCards
Any laptop that can work with SD Cards can also take MultiMediaCards in its multiformat card reader. These small, thin cards look like their SD counterparts (and are often lumped into the same category), but the technology inside is different, as these cards lack SD’s encryption and have only half the storage capacity. They’re also slower. If security and speed are not critical issues for you, MultiMediaCard can be a cheaper alternative to the more popular SD; many devices that accept SD will also take the slightly thinner MultiMediaCard. Regardless, this laptop gives you the choice of using either format.
Connect to the Net Via Ethernet Port
Even though Wi-Fi is all the rage, an ethernet connection for wired networking is still a nice thing to have. Ethernet jacks allow for instant connections to the Internet, e-mail, and applications over a fast, secure wired network. Ethernet comes in three speeds: the all-but-obsolete traditional ethernet, limited to 10 megabits per second; fast ethernet, which works at up to 100 megabits per second; and gigabit ethernet, which operates at up to a gigabit per second. If your laptop is equipped with the still-common fast ethernet, it won’t be able to take full advantage of the performance that a gigabit-ethernet network has to offer. But more and more laptops now come with gigabit ethernet, in which case you’re covered for access to the fastest type of wired network.
Windows XP Installed
Currently Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system remains an option for sub-$600 mini-notebooks (also known as “netbooks”). Although it debuted back in 2001, XP is still popular among many computer users, especially in businesses that have standardized on the OS and have no desire to switch to the 3D-heavy Vista. XP introduced a lot of the useful built-in applications we now take for granted, including the ability to burn CDs, as well as Remote Desktop, which lets telecommuters connect to another XP computer across a network or the Internet and access their programs and files. This streamlined operating system should run fine on this notebook.
Be Wary of Battery Life Specs
Take the battery life you see advertised for any laptop with a grain of salt. Why? A few vendors still use unrealistic testing parameters in order to report the longest battery life possible. For example, a “tested” laptop simply might be turned on, with the screen brightness lowered to the darkest level, and allowed to run down without anyone touching it. When the laptop undergoes typical, everyday use–say, with the screen brightness turned up to a readable level and with the user working in several applications or playing a CD or DVD movie–its battery life could be much shorter than a vendor’s claims.
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