MiddleBar.com http://middlebar.com Tips, reviews for consumer electronics, computers and entertainment Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:53:10 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8 en hourly 1 The Sony VAIO FW31E 16.4-inch Laptop Review http://middlebar.com/the-sony-vaio-fw31e-16-4-inch-laptop-review.html http://middlebar.com/the-sony-vaio-fw31e-16-4-inch-laptop-review.html#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 23:53:08 +0000 MiddleBar.com http://middlebar.com/the-sony-vaio-fw31e-16-4-inch-laptop-review.html The Sony VAIO FW31E 16.4-inch Laptop Review Review for Sony VAIO FW31E 16.4-inch Laptop. A quick non tech review, plenty of those splattered all over the net, plus I am not that much of a techy anyway, I use the laptop for word processing, internet surfing, watching films, editing and storing pictures and family videos

I bought this laptop purely based on ergonomics. The other competitors in the 16.5 inch bracket were too dam ugly/businessy/pasticy to contemplate. I have to admit that when closed, the blue/grey plastic back is not much to look at, but once you open the lid, the view changes considerably. The magnesium curvy chassis is very pleasant and well designed, I personally find it nicer than the Mac equivalent. The “scrabble style” keyboard is nicely laid out and it is a joy to use. The screen is very bright, colours are vibrant and clear. The odd 16.4 inch size works wonderfully well. Hardware wise, it is very well equipped and dealt with every task without breaking a sweat, Vista is a a pain to use, I installed Windows7 Beta and frankly it transformed this machine into something twice as good!
The mack-book pro is twice as expensive but nowhere near twice as good when it comes to everyday tasks. This is a very well specced and well priced laptop. Unless you’re into heavy gaming, this is probably the best laptop you can get at present.

]]> http://middlebar.com/the-sony-vaio-fw31e-16-4-inch-laptop-review.html/feed 0 The Acer Aspire 5920G 15.4-inch Laptop Review http://middlebar.com/the-acer-aspire-5920g-15-4-inch-laptop-review.html http://middlebar.com/the-acer-aspire-5920g-15-4-inch-laptop-review.html#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:12:50 +0000 MiddleBar.com http://middlebar.com/the-acer-aspire-5920g-15-4-inch-laptop-review.html The Acer Aspire 5920G 15.4-inch Laptop Review Review for Acer Aspire 5920G 15.4-inch Laptop – I have just bought this item and WOW what a piece of kit. I know all of you budding computer experts and mega gamers might disagree, and yes you can buy better machines than this, BUT (and it is a big BUT) you can not get this sort of system, with this sort of setup, at this low price, and don’t be fooled, you are not wasting your money. I am, what I would call, a medium gamer and I am an ICT Techy and I have installed a few upto date games and i have had no problems with playing them online or normally. The graphics card is more than capable to do what most people want, the Blueray drive is amazing and very simple to connect too a HDTV and use as a player, you have plenty of Ram and sufficiant HDD space, infact Acer have built a great system. All in all, this is a good buy, I don’t regret at all in buying this item, infact I think this is a bargin buy. So if you have lots of money and can afford over 1k then buy something better, but if you are like me, then buy this, a few good ways to help with the credit crunch. You can not go wrong! ]]> http://middlebar.com/the-acer-aspire-5920g-15-4-inch-laptop-review.html/feed 0 The Samsung NC20 12.1-inch Mini Laptop Review http://middlebar.com/the-samsung-nc20-12-1-inch-mini-laptop-review.html http://middlebar.com/the-samsung-nc20-12-1-inch-mini-laptop-review.html#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 06:27:31 +0000 MiddleBar.com http://middlebar.com/the-samsung-nc20-12-1-inch-mini-laptop-review.html The Samsung NC20 12.1-inch Mini Laptop Review I was looking for a light weight notebook at an affordable price. The 10″ netbooks were not suitable for me for few reasons (10″ does not have a comfortable key board, too much scrolling, Intel Atom processor is not good for movies). So I was left with two choices. Dell Mini 12 or a long wait for Samsung NC20. I waited and waited for the black one. This is an excellent notebook. I call it a notebook since it is powerful enough to do little processor intensive tasks. The keyboard is very comfortable. 160GB hard disk is sufficient for me. When it fills up, i can replace it with a higher capacity hard disk if I want to which was not possible in Dell mini 12. The display is sharp and bright. The finish of the laptop is excellent. While watching movies the processor is not overloaded unlike atom. That gives a smooth movie experience on a comfortable screen size. The battery life is 4 hours plus is quite an advantage. I do not take the charger with me. That saves about half kilogram in weight. I do not know of any other laptop/netbook weighing less than 2 kilograms with 12″ or more screen size with 4 hours battery life for less than £400. So I am quite happy about what I waited for. I was using an old notebook with its page-up/down keys on the top right hand side corner. In NC20 it is near the up/down arrow keys. This is more convenient but took a few days to adjust myself.

But there are few things that I would like to have differently.
1) The charger and its wires are heavy, messy and not flexible. It could have been better, thinner and more flexible. The charger output is 19V, 2.1A. That means about 40W. Its mains wire is as thick as that of a 1kW iron box. Remember that there is no space for this charger in the sleeve Samsung provides with NC20.
2) I would like to have a small pouch for charger and its wires.
3) It looks to me it is like taking long time to charge the battery to full (2 hours or more.)
4)The short right shift key and the position of backslash key near right shift key is a trouble at least at the beginning.
5) Samsung should have given an official upgrade to 2GB RAM.
6) Linux users will have some trouble with the display drivers. Openchrome is not stable yet for NC20. Jaunty does not install out of the box. WLAN also does not work out of the box in NC20. This is one reason I can not give top score to NC20.
7) Samsung could give an Ubuntu version of NC20. It would have saved me money as I an not windows user. I have all the free productivity/office tools in Ubuntu.
8) Sometimes it is difficult to feel the boundary of touch pad. A little different texture of the touch pad would have solved it. Until then they could fix the big Samsung sticker on the right hand side. It will act as guide for right handers like me.
9) The sleeve that comes with NC20 is very convenient and light. But it may not protect the netbook as it is very thin.
10) I think the processor (VIA Nano) heats up a little bit. There is a fan running. This is one disadvantage compared to Dell Mini 12 which I guess is fan-less.

]]> http://middlebar.com/the-samsung-nc20-12-1-inch-mini-laptop-review.html/feed 0 The Sony Vaio NS20ES 15.4-inch Laptop Review http://middlebar.com/the-sony-vaio-ns20es-15-4-inch-laptop-review.html http://middlebar.com/the-sony-vaio-ns20es-15-4-inch-laptop-review.html#comments Wed, 24 Jun 2009 00:06:33 +0000 MiddleBar.com http://middlebar.com/the-sony-vaio-ns20es-15-4-inch-laptop-review.html The Sony Vaio NS20ES 15.4-inch Laptop Review Sony Vaio NS20ES 15.4-inch Laptop – This is really quite a nice laptop. The appearance is outstanding and the screen has good colour rendition. The keyboard has a good feel and the battery lasts for at least two hours without the need to recharge. The spec is pretty good with the only absence of note being that here is no standalone graphics card. However my daughter has loaded Rome Total war and World of Warcraft and both appear to play well. The software bundle is nothing special and a fair amount of junk that would be best deleted. The hard drive has a good capacity, which is needed as I was shocked at how resource hungry Windows Vista is. The WiFi on my computer works well. For the money this is a quality product and looks and works first class. I researched this thoroughly before I bought and I have not been disappointed and would be happy to recommend

]]> http://middlebar.com/the-sony-vaio-ns20es-15-4-inch-laptop-review.html/feed 0