There is no optical drive in the U350, much like in other thin-and-lights such as the Acer(Acer Aspire One 8.9″ battery) Timeline series and the MSI X340. In that sense, the U350 is a closer cousin to the MacBook Air, although a bit thicker (the U350 is 1 inch tall). At first glance, the U350 looks thick enough to have handled an optical drive, but the lightweight feel without it is refreshing.
I should add that the 2100 ran nice and quiet, but a little hot. I found that with prolonged use, the lower-left quadrant warmed up a bit. The effect wasn’t anything to complain about, but I did notice it.
Does the Dell(Dell Inspiron 6000 battery) Latitude 2100 jump to the head of its class? Well, it’s certainly the most mature (and the beefiest) take on a netbook in recent memory. And, yeah, if you can look past the price it’s a good option for your young scholar–and then when he or she brings it home at the end of the day, maybe Dad can borrow it to tinker in an Ubuntu partition. That’s assuming you don’t mind that kind of cost for what’s billed as a child’s computer. Make the Latitude 2100 a little less boxy and kid-oriented, and I’d consider using this touchscreen PC myself.
The touch pad, too, is textured, but in its case, it’s a grid of raised dots. The feel is an acquired taste. For the first hour we had the NW125, the touch pad felt too rough, as if we were moving the cursor by dragging a finger over a piece of sandpaper. After a short time, we began to like the feel it provides–the polar opposite of the overly glossy touch pads found on HP( HP 2133 Battery) Pavilions–and found it to be very responsive. The touch pad also features wide vertical and horizontal scroll regions along its right and bottom edges, respectively. The mouse buttons border on being clacky, but they’re far from egregious offenders in this regard.
I’ve reformatted the notebook. I’ve tried multiple different drivers from laptopvideo2go (to wit: they either never installed or they blue-screened the computer on boot) and had to stick with HP(Pavilion dv 2133 battery)’s for the 7150M. The sad fact is that Aero Glass runs horribly on the 7150M. Moving windows and scrolling within them is just plain choppy, and despite all my best efforts I cannot get them to render well. While most of you probably won’t care, I’m too used to the silky smooth performance of Vista on my desktop. The pathetic performance of Aero Glass on the GeForce 7150M is damning and more than that, just plain inexcusable. I don’t know if I should blame nVidia or Microsoft, but it’s pathetic.
Included is a built-in 8X DVD-RW optical drive manufactured jointly by Samsung and Toshiba. This drive is capable of burning & reading DVD-R, DVD+R, DVD-RW, Latitude D600 Battery ,DVD+RW, DVD-RAM, CD-R/RW discs. Noise is kept to a drowned hum in most circumstances but can get noisy once it hits max speed. Testing the drive yielded no problems.
3DMark 2003 build 3.6.0 measures DX9 performance through a series of 3D game based sound, graphics, and CPU tests. Resolution was set to 1024×768 with all default settings.
3DMark2005 build 1.2.0 is a graphics intensive benchmark best suited for the latest generation of DirectX 9.0 graphics cards. It combines high quality 3D tests, CPU tests, and is the first benchmark to require Pixel Shader 2.0 support, making this a highly stressful 3D benchmark.
“Free” netbooks sold in cell phone-like plans could appeal to businessIn keeping with the theme of netbooks as Internet-enabled communications devices, vendors have begun experimenting with new pricing models that could turn the PC market on its head. Because data communications requires data connectivity, netbook Toshiba Satellite A20-S103 battery manufacturers and mobile data carriers have been exploring partnerships that could see the consumer cost of netbooks effectively drop to zero. The carriers would subsidize all or much of the netbooks’ cost through monthly connectivity charges, as they do with cell phones. With netbook prices approaching the $200 range, it’s easy to envision them doing the same for this new class of devices.