IPC Top Note > Reviews > You get what you pay for EDITED, Please Re Rate

Author's product rating:   

Speed	Fast
Look & Feel	Good
Comfort & Portability	Excellent
Robustness & Durability	Poor
Value For Money	Good

Advantages:	cheap, lightweight
Disadvantages:	reliability, support

Recommend to potential buyers:

no

Full review

There are a few Topnote models, i will talk about the most recent one, the Topnote F 1000.

Features

You take it out of the box and the first thing you notice is the solid feel of it. The spec is as follows:

1GHz Celeron Processor
128MB RAM
10 GB Hard-disk
6xDVD-ROM/24x CD-ROM
13.3" TFT Screen
NI-MH Battery
Touchpad Mouse
Windows XP Home Edition (On Recover CD)
WINDVD 2000

Ok, so the spec isnt soo bad, especially for £799, BUT, As ive said there are drawbacks which i will go in to more detail about later. The prcessor is about bottom of the range in a laptop now, most being shipped with at least a 1.2GHz, but hey, this is a bottom of the range machine. It has a decent amount of memory, which is pleasing to see,as this seems to be the area that a lot of laptop manufacturers seem to get wrong, normally only supplying 64MB. Next is the DVD drive. This is somewhat a rarity on a machine this price. Not really a great deal to say about it. It plays DVD's (with good quality, no jumping), and guess wot, it reads standard CD's.
The screen is a nice unit, if a bit small, but again, wot do you really expect for a bottom of the range "budget" machine. It is flicker free, and has a decent refresh rate, but not really good enough for fast paced gaming.
The battery is reasonable, but not lithium which gives much better life that the Ni-MH, but it still gives around two hours of use from a full charge. Just remember tho, if you are using the DVD/CD-ROM it will be reduced a lot, as this uses a lot of power.
The touchpad mouse is the same as on any other laptop, being easy to use, no real problems here.
As ive said above, it comes shipped with Windows XP Hom Edition. This is pre-installed and ready to use, but in the event of windows failure, you can recover it to factory settings using the recovery CD. This is very good for the begginner and advanced users alike. It takes about 30 minutes to completly format and re-install windows, and its all automatic, whereas if you were to do this manually it would probably take around an hour and a quater.

Build Quality

Generally this is very very good, however it seems that to get the DVD drives in they had to use ones from a different machine, meaning it does not fit flush, rathe rit is slightly recessed. No problem really, just one of those annoying niggly little things.
All the clips work to hold the screen down, and it feels and looks very solid. The unit itself is silver with a blue lid, but looks very very stylish.

Backup/Manuals

The first real problem, especially for the first time user, is the fact the a large majority of the maunals were sent in spanish. There isnt a great deal of information in here, but every little helps.
The tech support number is an 0800 number which is nice to see, however getting through on it is a different matter. If you ever need to contact them, then my advice is get comfortable and have the patience of a saint. If you do get through, then they are genrally very happy to help and are quick in their diagnostics. If the machine has to go back for repair, it is usually picked up the following day and dropped back within a week.

Speed

Well, its 1000 MHz (Mega-hertz), which is just about average, it has a healty amount of RAM, which together make for a reasonably quick machine. The only downfall on this part is the size of the hard disk. It doesnt really affect the speed, but again, its one of those things that could/should have been bigger.

Reliability

This is the biggest problem with these machines. There are a number of well known problems, including batteries not holding their charge, DVD drives failing, modems not dialing etc. My advice is to check the machine thoroughly asap, so if there are any problems then you can get it replaced.

Conclusion

If you get a good machine, then well done, and you've got yourself a bargain. if not, then percevere, its worth it.