Product Reviews

In last month's Labs test we looked at notebooks that cost less than £700. This price was once the entry-level but it now buys a capable notebook. Evesham's Quest eXPlorer costs £200 less, so we were interested to see if it also offers good value.

The eXPlorer is fairly large and weighs 3.4kg, but it seems solid. The lid has suitably stiff hinges, although pressure applied from the rear discolours the screen. The 1,024x768 resolution panel is clear and bright, with smooth greyscale transitions and even illumination but narrow viewing angles.

The eXPlorer's rather square base doesn't raise the keyboard too far above the desk, so typing is comfortable. The keyboard's layout is conventional and keys have a decent, if stiffly sprung, feel. There's enough distance between the keys and the touch pad to prevent accidental cursor movements, and the base stays cool while the computer is on.

Other than style, little is missing. The eXPlorer has a DVD/CD combo drive rather than a DVD writer,

ADVERTISEMENT

and the 40GB hard disk is on the small side but adequate for most mobile computing needs.

At the rear are PS/2, parallel and serial ports, a D-sub video output and connectors for the onboard modem and network card. Three USB2 ports, a PC Card slot and a four-format card reader are clustered haphazardly on the left. The front audio sockets are flanked by blanking plates for absent FireWire and infrared ports, a small reminder of the notebook's entry-level nature. The only significant omission is wireless networking, but it's not surprising at this price, and a Wireless LAN PC card is an inexpensive upgrade.

The eXPlorer is the first computer we've reviewed that uses AMD's Mobile Sempron processor, in this case the 2600+ model, which has a clock speed of 1.6GHz. Evesham has added 256MB of DDR333 RAM.

The Evesham performed surprisingly well next to our budget Labs notebooks. Its PCMark04 and overall Shopper application benchmark results would have placed it in the middle of our group of nine £700 computers, as would its battery life of over three hours.

Its score of 69 on the video-encoding part of the Shopper benchmarks was particularly impressive, but this was offset by a terrible image-manipulation score of six. This could be improved by adding a further 256MB of memory, for which the chassis has a free slot.

If you want a highly portable notebook, or one with the power to play games, you'll need to spend a lot more than £500. But if that's your budget and you need a capable notebook for office work and occasional travel, the eXPlorer is a bargain.