AJP 7321

This month, both Sony and Toshiba have demonstrated that you don't have to lose out on style by going for a desktop replacement. Following such stylish innovations as the Neo-PC II (see Reviews, issue 76, p134), you might expect AJP to follow suit with its latest 7321 desktop replacement. Instead, it's a huge notebook that wouldn't be out of place in the early 1990s. At 41mm high when closed and weighing 3.3kg, it's chunky and unadventurous in design, but looks like it means business, which is luckily what it was built for.

The AJP isn't going to make you look like Inspector Gadget on the train, but it has performance where it counts, thanks to the 1.1GHz Athlon processor. The new Palomino core has pushed AMD's desktop performance way ahead of Intel's, but it's a different story in the mobile market. A score of 2.93 in our 2D benchmarks is very fast, but not as quick as the recent results from the Intel Pentium III-M processor. A prime example is the Dell Inspiron 8100 1130UT (see Reviews, issue 84, p132), which mustered up 3.37 with its 1.13GHz Pentium III-M and 128Mb less RAM than the AJP.

That said, performance was fantastic for the modest £999 asking price, so if you want a fast, no-frills business notebook the AJP is worth a look. By no frills, I mean that while it has all the standard ports, it lacks new innovations such as IEEE-1394, Bluetooth, wireless LAN, an SD card reader or even a DVD-ROM and CD-RW combo drive. Only a basic TEAC CD-ROM is provided along with the expected floppy drive, legacy serial ports and two USB ports. Thankfully, there are two Type II PC Card slots, a V.90 modem and a 10/100BaseTX Ethernet adaptor, so you're not missing out on any essential functionality.

There is a saving grace, however, in the form of the keyboard. It may not look like much compared to the Dell, but it's very easy to type on quickly, quietly and accurately. There's a sensible amount of space allocated to all the keys, including a large spacebar. Its only downfall, as with the rest of the chassis, is that it looks at least five years old despite being brand new.

The same can be said of the 14.1in XGA TFT screen: it's well lit and has reasonable viewing angles, but the poor image quality makes it look second rate compared to the competition. The colours are dull and you can see the lines of pixels all too clearly.

It can be taken for granted that a machine like this will spend the majority of its working life plugged in, so battery life isn't essential. This is just as well, as the AJP only lasted for 79 minutes under our test, which is long enough for most people but significantly over-shadowed by the 151 minutes the Toshiba Satellite 3000 (see Reviews, issue 84, p135) took to run down.

Unlike the competition from Dell, Sony and Toshiba, AJP has gone for the S3 Twister K's shared memory architecture over Nvidia's GeForce2 Go or ATi's Radeon Mobility. With a 3DMark2000 score of 945 running at 1,024 x 768 in 16-bit colour, it's not exactly on the cutting edge of 3D performance. You can assign 8Mb, 16Mb or 32Mb of system memory to the graphics in the BIOS, which should be no problem with 384Mb to start with.

This is a lot of memory, perhaps overkill for the Windows ME operating system, but it provides some healthy future-proofing if you were ever to upgrade to Windows XP. The 30Gb Hitachi hard disk is also a great inclusion for the money, giving you fast performance and plenty of storage.

If this is what you're after, the AJP will serve its purpose, but it's a chunky and unattractive machine which lacks the modern features that make the competition stand out. If you can find the extra money, you'd be better off looking at the Sony VAIO PCG-GR114MK (see p165) or the superb Toshiba Satellite 3000. They may not be as fast, but the speed difference is almost negligible and worth forsaking for a superior screen, a DVD-ROM and CD-RW and all the other features on offer.

Author: Ben Hardwidge