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Everex StepNote SA2053T

72

Good

  • Pros
  • Affordable ultraportable
  • Good overall design
  • Cons
  • Terrible battery life
  • No bundled software
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Everex StepNote SA2053T Review

by Carla Thornton

If you can tolerate the short battery life, this inexpensive ultraportable is a super choice.

The Everex StepNote SA2053T has hideous battery life, but at $899 (as of 6/6/07), it costs half as much as most ultraportables. It also looks good and handles e-mail and Web applications just fine.

The SA2053T, currently available only at Best Buy, lacks bundled software. It does come with two batteries, a three-cell that lasted all of 70 minutes on one charge and a bonus six-cell that we did not test. (Everex estimates 2 hours for the three-cell and 3 hours for the six-cell.) Including the lighter battery, the weight is 3.8 pounds. Even adding the 1-pound power adapter, the total weight of the machine is still less than 5 pounds.

Black and silver with a case that's smartly beveled in front, the SA2053T looks more expensive than it is. It sports a reasonably bright 12.1-inch wide screen, a good keyboard, and remarkably robust stereo speakers for a small laptop; in fact, it's not a half-bad CD player. It's generously equipped overall, including such niceties as a DVD burner, an ExpressCard slot, and a 100GB hard drive.

Despite the unit's poor battery life, our WorldBench 6 Beta 2 tests indicate that its speed should be adequate for everyday tasks such as word processing and Web surfing. Equipped with a 1.73-GHz Core Duo T2080 processor, 1GB of RAM, and integrated graphics, the SA2053T performed sluggishly in our graphics and multitasking tests and earned an overall WorldBench 6 Beta 2 score of 54--just above average among currently tested ultraportables.

If you don't have the dough for a brand-name ultraportable from Dell or Lenovo, take a look at the SA2053T. Just remember to pack the power adapter for when your battery runs out.

Carla Thornton

User Reviews for Everex StepNote SA2053T

  • Reviewed by: rokky

    Duration of ownership: 0 Month

    Strengths: n/a

    Weaknesses: Illegal to void warranty due to memory upgrade??

    Overall Evaluation: FYI to Sayart: It should be just as illegal for Everex to void your warranty for a memory upgrade as it was for Asus to do that with the EEE PC. It is a violation of the Moss-Magnuson Act (US federal law - n/a if you are not in the US). After that was pointed out on many web fora, they acknowledged their mistake, and annnounced that it was no longer a warranty-voiding action. HTH

  • Reviewed by: gyozadude

    Duration of ownership: 3 Months

    Strengths: Low price, small form factor, relative light weight, bright screen, dual core performance, DVD burner, two-batteries come with package

    Weaknesses: None so far

    Overall Evaluation: Great price performance. Had no issues with this, and it installs Linux and Solaris Nevada for x86 platforms, which is what I do software development in most of the time. I haven't experienced the battery life problems or lack of software bundled. I tend to use free ware like Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice and GIMP - all available for Windows as well, but they run fine under Solaris for me. The wifi support for the Ralink RT73 (a USB device NOT PCIe!) is iffy with some distros, but support is coming or already there on latest Linux and soon on Solaris according to my sources. Compile and encoding performance and multi-tasking/multi-threading work great with UNIX flavours of OS. Hard to beat the price performance. I've had this for quite a few months now and I haven't had issues with it. Note: Specs are wrong about Max memory. Chipset is Intel ICH7-M which supports 4GB Max with 2GB per slot. This only has one slot pulled out on the mobo, but I had no issues replacing the stock dimm with a Patriot 2GB DDR2 5300 sodimm and getting bios, and all OSes to recognize and run it.

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