The Amilo A1640 is a cheap, but powerful laptop, ideal for the home, and maybe schools and small offices too, due to it’s wireless capability. I can’t really say much about what you can do with it, that would make it more of a review of Windows XP, but I can tell you about price, speed, battery, memory etc.
We brought this laptop from PC World, at a very inviting price of £699.99, with an all in one printer thrown in at half price. We were moving house and our old computer was on it’s last legs. It was probably made about 10 years ago, it had a 6 GB hard drive and was slower than a calculator. It also made some funny noises. We chose a laptop because it doesn’t take up much space and can easily be put completely away when not in use.
When the idea of a laptop came up, I was very reluctant. My view of laptops was slow and barely any memory. Not this one. It has a 40 GB hard drive which is good. It has a Mobile AMD Sempron processor, which has a speed of 798 MHz and has 480 MB of RAM. The result is a smooth and quick screen.
In case you’re mixed up with hard drives and RAM, a hard drive is the total memory the computer can store. RAM is the temporary memory, and is the size of files the computer can hold until it needs to be saved into the hard drive.
Back to the review. The Amilo A1640 is black, with silver on the integrated mouse and where you rest your wrists, and on the outside of the lid. The lid can open to about 135 degrees and cannot swivel. Sometimes you wonder how info goes between the base and the screen, because there are 2 hinges (so obliviously through these, don’t ask me how!), and in the middle is a gap! Looks like magic. If you look at the laptop you’ll see what I mean.
The laptop come pre-installed with Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition. You can uninstall it and put the Professional Edition on if you want, but I recommend you stick to one of these, since the laptop was built for Windows XP.
The integrated mouse is, as with all laptops, annoying. We now have a USB Wireless Optical mouse. The annoying thing is that while using the new mouse, you can’t disable the integrated mouse. So if you accidentally lean on the pad, the cursor moves about. Very annoying. If you prefer this though, here are the facts. An integrated mouse is a touch pad on a laptop. Simply hold your finger on it, and move it in the right direction. There is also a left and right button and a smaller, narrower pad, where you move your finger up and down as a scroll wheel. A short tap on the main pad, can be used instead of the left button.
The laptop has all the usual buttons you’d expect from a PC except the numerical number pad. There is also an “Fn” key. Hold this and press one of the F keys to perform certain tasks, including standby, mute, volume, contrast and brightness.
The battery power is reasonable. I’ve concluded that the laptop loses about 1% of power a minute, and that’s for something simple like typing this review. Video, audio, and games take more. This is OK, since we use the laptop around the house and there is usually a plug somewhere. Business people use laptops on trains and planes and there are usually plugs here too. It’s not often you see someone walking down the street holding and using a laptop! Then, you may consider buying a laptop with a better battery. Say ‘I’ if this is you. That’s what I thought. Silence.
The laptop has a built in speaker which is loud enough for the job, and a built in microphone. Although it’s something…it’s crap. Its at the top of the of the inside lid and has a microphone symbol next to it. The hole for sound is as big as a full stop at the end of this sentence. You have to reach right up to it and shout as loud as you can. And when you play it back, it’s dead quiet. 4/10 for this.
With the Amilo A1640 you get, a connection for an external monitor, 3 USB 2.0 ports, and connections for the following:- ‘S-Video out’, ‘Power adaptor’, ‘IEEE 1394 FireWire’, ‘Microphone’, ‘Speakers’, ‘Headphones’, ‘LAN connector’, ’Modem port’, and a Wireless PC Card. There is no floppy drive but there is a CD drive which has a CD reader, a CD re-writer, a DVD player, and a DVD re-writer. How’s that for a piece of equipment. There is also a built in memory card reader that supports ‘Secure Digital’, ‘MultiMediaCard’, and ‘Memory Stick / Memory Stick pro’.
At the top are 4 buttons which are for:- Microsoft Outlook Express, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Power button, And a ‘fan’ button. By turning the fan off, the laptop gets hotter and runs slightly slower, however, it makes the laptop dead silent (apart from the speakers). Useful for some occasions, but not for too long.
The laptop came boxed with a user guide (in English and German), a warranty leaflet, a quick start guide to Windows XP, other various leaflets and a power pack / charger. Hope this is useful. Definantly recommended for a family laptop. Thanks for reading.
(+) wirless network , been able to take the computer all over with you (-) the disadvantage is sometimes the internet can go down or needs another battery
