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Everex StepNote SA2053T

72

Good

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Pros
Affordable ultraportable
Good overall design
Cons
Terrible battery life
No bundled software

Performance: Poor: 52
Features: Good: 72
Design: Good: 76

Find out how these scores, and their relative weights, combine to produce the PC World Rating.

Performance
Adobe Photoshop CS2	1184
Autodesk 3ds max 8.0 SP-3 DirectX	717
Autodesk 3ds max 8.0 SP-3 Rendering	1061
Battery Life (Video Playback in hh:mm)	1:10:47 AM
Far Cry, 1024 by 768, 32-Bit	8.19
Firefox 2	482
Microsoft Office 2003 with SP-1	477
Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9.0	370
Multitasking	627
Nero 7 Ultra Edition	1489
Number of Included Batteries	1
Roxio VideoWave Movie Creator 1.5	309
Winzip Computing WinZip 10.0	565
WorldBench 6 Score	54
WorldBench 6 Word Score	Poor

What You Should Know about the StepNote SA2053T

Not Much RAM for Multitasking

The more RAM your laptop has, the faster programs will run and the greater number of windows you can work in at one time. If your needs are simple and you rarely do more than two things at once on your PC, the relatively modest amount of memory that comes installed in inexpensive laptops will be enough. Today the standard amount of RAM shipped in most PCs is 2GB. If you like to multitask--say, you want to launch a search for a file and start backing up data to a disc while you watch a news video--you need more memory.

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.