I bought my Averatec 3260 last August (£520 delivered from Savastore). Me and my girlfriend were looking to buy a laptop and we wanted to split the cost. I travel a lot in my job, so I wanted an ultraportable and was pushing for a Sony Viao or Toshiba, but my girlfriend insisted that she could not afford to pay for a laptop that cost over £650. I ended up picking the Averatec, and I have to admit I was a bit worried when I initially ordered it. I had never heard of the company and I was worried about customer service should anything go wrong.
When it arrived we were quite happy. It wasn't bundled with any great software but it ran all the software we put on it pretty smoothly. The 512MB RAM is quite impressive for a laptop (Dell still kit out most of their desktops with 512MB RAM as standard) and means that the Averetec multitasks pretty well. Usually, I will have Firefox, MediaMonkey (music player) and Word running simultaneously and there is never any slowdown. Often I will also have QuarkXpress running too and the Averatec handles that as well. We also use it to watch movies, which also works pretty well.
The main problem was the fan - the laptop would get really hot in a short space of time eventually (in September - 7 weeks after we got it) the fan failed. I called the customer service people (who are based in Germany) and they were very very helpful. They sent a courier to pick it up the next day and it was returned to me exactly 7 days later - just as they said. When it was returned there was even a note from the technician explaining what he had done and why the fan had failed (apparently it had not been configured correctly). I didn't want to take any further chances with the fan so I bought a cooling pad that I generally keep it on these days, and it has worked just fine since.
I've taken it on loads of working trips now, it is used every day in our house, and it serves our purpose very well and we are generally very pleased we bought it. However, if you want to play games on it, forget it. The graphics card really is poor, and I have not been able to get any 3D games to run satisfactorily. I have tried installing Sims 2, Pirates and Freedom Force and none were playable. The only one that worked was Football Manager 2006 - and that worked really well, better even than my desktop. Also, the speakers are fairly poor - the sound is tinny and the top volume is not very loud - and the battery life is only about two and a half hours max.
For the price I would definitely recommend this laptop - I have never seen a 12.1" ultraportable at a cheaper price and it has worked pretty well for me. When something went wrong they fixed it quickly, which is all I ask. If you need a laptop for work and if you travel, I don't think you can beat this relative to the price.
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Feb 15th, 2006
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