Packard Bell EasyNote T

Hot on the heels of Packard Bell's stylish iExtreme 6080 desktop PC is the first of the company's new notebooks, the EasyNote T.

Although basic-looking, the EasyNote T has a good specification and is designed to be truly mobile, thanks to the inclusion of Centrino technology. This gives better battery life and integrated Wi-Fi for connecting to wireless networks.

The EasyNote T comes with a mobile 1.3GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor, which is a more battery-considerate version of the desktop processor. It might seem to be a little underpowered by today's standards but due to some clever technical tinkering, a 1.3GHz mobile processor has similar performance to a 1.7GHz desktop Pentium 4.

It's backed up by 256Mb of memory, although you lose some of this because the onboard Intel graphics have to borrow 32Mb. We found that the graphics worked well for standard Windows applications but you'll have trouble running 3D games.

The 14.1in screen has a resolution of 1024 x 768, which is fine for general use. The screen itself looks sharp and once the display settings were tinkered with, we had a clear and bright Windows Desktop. The two stereo speakers housed on either side of the screen provide adequate sound but don't expect much oomph from them. Instead, plug in some headphones or hook up a set of external speakers.

The EasyNote T has a 30Gb hard disk, which is the bottom end of what we'd expect to find in a notebook, especially one at this price. It will suffice if all you want to do is some word processing, web surfing and storage of your holiday snaps. However, start playing with audio and video files and you'll find that the hard disk soon gets gobbled up.

Thankfully, there's a DVD/CD-RW combination drive at hand so you can archive old files when you start to run out of disk space. Positioned around the side is the usual collection of ports for connecting peripherals or connecting to the internet.

The EasyNote T is quite pleasant to use. It's fairly light and is less than 3cm thick, making transportation less of a chore than others. It's built with an extra mouse button for scrolling up and down documents and internet pages, while two practical shortcut buttons will launch your email client and web browser.

Windows XP Home edition is pre-installed, while a decent selection of software is also thrown in. This includes MS Works 2003, RecordNow DX (CD recording), Power DVD, Norton AntiVirus and Internet Security 2003.

All in all, the EasyNote T isn't bad. The price seems quite extravagant for what it is but as we've said before, you pay a premium for the latest technology, in this case Centrino. The hard disk could do with being a bit bigger and we would have liked a larger screen for the price. Although there are cheaper, better specified notebooks on the market, the EasyNote T is a sturdy computer that will do its job.

Contact: Packard Bell 01628 512400
www.packardbell.co.uk