Product Reviews

Now that more and more notebooks are built never to leave a desk, it's easy to forget that many users want a computer that's truly portable. In our Notebook Price Test 2005 (Shopper May 2005), we tested five small and light notebooks designed for working on the move. Unfortunately the cheapest, Toshiba's Portege A200, costs around £920 including VAT and includes only 256MB of memory.

Averatec's 3300 isn't much larger than the A200 and is slightly lighter, but it costs just £761. This is a remarkably good price for a notebook that weighs just 1.967kg. It feels rugged enough to transport, too, with a robust silver chassis and a lid that provides reasonable protection to its screen.

The keyboard is an uninspiring shade of grey, but it doesn't flex when in use and the keys have a pleasant click action. Some of the more unusual keys have been shrunk in size significantly to fit into the small chassis, but the main letter keys are reasonably sized. The touch pad works well, and its buttons have a nice soft

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click that's easy to use.

The 12.1" screen has a resolution of 1,024x768, which is on the small side but acceptable for office work or surfing the web. It's reasonably bright, and showed our greyscale tests with only slight banding. It had a little difficulty showing definition between very dark shades, which will be a disadvantage when watching DVDs but of little consequence for work use.

A 60GB hard disk provides plenty of storage, and there's a dual-format DVD writer built into the chassis. There are three USB2.0 ports on the right, with a CardBus slot, D-sub monitor output, Ethernet and modem connectors on the left.

Inside the 3300 is an excellent balance between portability, power and price. It uses an Intel Centrino chipset with a Pentium M processor to save battery life, but the 1.5GHz processor provides more than enough power for the kind of tasks the 3300 will be used for. Although its processor is slower than the pricier A200 it has twice as much memory, and scored over 20 points more in our Shopper benchmarks.

Portable notebooks rarely excel in our 3D tests, and the 3300 is no exception. It uses Intel's ageing Extreme Graphics 2 integrated graphics processor, which is incapable of playing modern games.

The Averatec 3300 impressed us. It's rare to find a reasonably powerful notebook that weighs under 2kg at this price, and such features as a DVD writer and roomy hard disk are always handy even in a portable notebook for work use. If you'd really like an ultra-portable but can't afford to spend over £1,200, this is a reasonable alternative for a lot less.