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This laptop is cheap - damned cheap! I guess one of the major reasons is the Sempron processor, which I gathered is the successor to the now-discontinued Athlon-XP line of mobile processors. This chip corresponds to Intel’s Celeron M processor in the pricing tables, for those of you who dont know of the existence of chipmakers other than Intel (some “tech savvy” Nigerians are so uninformed).

It doesn’t have the legacy Serial and Parallel ports though, and there’s neither Infrared nor Bluetooth, but these are compensated by 3 USB ports: one in front and two behind. One thing that was glaringly absent was a PCMCIA/PC-Card slot: if I want to use that kind of accessory, I’m stuck. It doesn’t have a firewire port, but I wont miss that because I don’t have any devices that require it.

The Laptop on my desk, editing this particular post in Wordpress

The laptop is light, and it doesn’t give off too much heat (again comparing with my hot monstrous Alienware Area51-m). The battery lasts quite a while; I’ve been able to use it up to 1 hour 45 mins running Windows Media Player 9 and Visual Studio 2005 alone.

Using the PC
I started up the laptop and was greeted by the usual “setup windows now” screen, so I went through the regular yada yada. I opted not to register with Microsoft or Packard Bell - simply not interested. After the process was done, I was welcomed to a desktop with a purple background (what an outlandish colour!) and loads of icons. There was also an app called Setup-My-PC which was begging me to carry out several initialisation tasks, one of them being to sign up with AOL. I really dont fancy their services anyway, and besides i’m in Lagos, y’all! I ignored the thing.

First thing I did was check the windows version. Yup, Windows XP Home for sure; I dont expect anything more from a cheap laptop. I run DirectX Diagnostics (this tool never disappoints me) to confirm the amount of memory, the processor speed and the properties of the Graphics Card. I notice that the RAM is less than the advertised 512MB, which lends proof to my suspicion that the Video memory is shared - another reason for the cheapness. Now dont get me wrong, I was just wondering how such a beautiful machine could sell for less than $400.

I reboot the machine and I go to the BIOS setup, and I notice that a whole 128MB out of the installed system memory of 512MB has been allocated to the graphics card! I don’t need that much video memory, so I step it down to 32MB. I also take the liberty of checking out the boot sequence and I notice that booting from USB storage devices is provided as an option. That’s cool. After setting my configuration, I save changes and boot up again.

I load DirectX Diagnostics again, and sure enough the changes were apparent. I now had more system RAM, although it was still less than 512MB. This shared memory architecture means I will need to buy more memory. I also noticed that the ATI Graphics card can only comfortably do 1280×800. Although it advertises other higher resolutions, those ones extend beyond the boundaries of the 15.4″ screen - which is of no use to me.

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