Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)PROS:
Size: 12.1 Big enough to see most web pages but small enough to carry on the plane and not have the tubby person in front of you crush the screen when they recline their seat back without warning.
USB ports: 3 of them, that is helpful.
HDMI: That's plus
Windows 7: Finally with Windows 7 media player you can see mov and mp4 video formats, even 3GP format. Those are major pluses because most mobile phones and HD video cameras shoot video in formats other than what previous versions of Windows Media player could read.
Battery: Still early, but on Wifi, watching (or trying to watch youtube videos), and screen at full brightness I am getting a little over 2 hours (would probably be better if it weren't for a problem I will mention later)
Sound: That sound is pretty good on this and it comes with a jack for the Microphone and for headphones and the Realtek sofware detects when you insert something into the jack and asks what type of device you are plugging in.
VGA PORT: That's a nice touch
Keyboard: Keys are responsive and a little larger that what was on my previous netbook
Screen: The video and pictures produced on the screen (when played from disk) are bright and crisp
CONS:
ONLINE VIDEO: Ok the biggest con and this huge for me is the fact when you watch online video, which ever browser you watch it in, IE 8, Firefox, or chrome, the process pegs at 100%. Go into task manager and you can see that whatever broswer you are watching video in is using up almost all of the CPU. Now if you want to watch HD off your hard drive, then you don't seem to have the same problem. The poor video performance was striaght out of the box with no software modifications. After making sure I had all of the latest updates from microsoft and finding no improvement in speed/quality, I tried downloading the latest flash player from Adobe, then I tried downloading different browsers to eliminate IE being problem. The online video performance of this U230 machine is subpar compared to the HP MINI 1030R I have which is only 1 1gz processor and a 1GB RAM machine. The video card is supposed to be HD, and when you are playing from a drive it works pretty well, but I didn't buy this machine to watch video from the drive, I have a desktop with a 1GB video card hook to a flatpanel TV for that.
Sluggish: The system overall seems a little sluggish, that could because windows 7 might be a little much for this machine, but I am comparing it to my other netbook which is a HP Mini running XP HomeOverall: I would probablly look for a different machine unless there is some sort of software/hardware fix the company is going to provide the correct the online video problem. If you aren't planning on using the laptop/netbook for online video, then you will probably not have any complaints with this laptop
Review Background:
Male
36 years old
12 years experience in IT industry (MCSE)
Graduate Degree
Experience with, DOS, Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Vista, Windows 7.
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MSI 12.1 wxga amd athlon neo mv-40 2gb 320gb bgn 6 cells w7hp 64 bit
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