A woman's ideal pc
Written: Jul 05 '01
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Pros: nice design, black, reasonably cheap
Cons: monitor is not good, slow, strange keyboard layout, only USB, no expansion
The Bottom Line: Stay clear of this one, it lacks performance, can not be upgraded, has bad backward compatibillity and the unique hardware makes for some terrible annoyances while using it.
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| snek_one's Full Review: IBM NetVista X40i all-in-one |
Let me start off by saying that I must admit that this is one of the most compact desktop pc's out on the market, and with the sleek design it looks absolutely beautiful. That is about the only good thing about it as well, next to the price. I find that the hardware is a little minimal for such a nice looking pc.
Lets start with the monitor, it's TFT and flat, great right? But no, this pc is NOT made for video, divx movies look extremely strange on this machine, and that has nothing to do with the player. The compression looks about 10x worse than normal. I figured it had something to do with the monitor, as it doesn't actually change resolution, it just sort of stretches the picture in a weird way. The videocard doesn't help much either, as it is a 4Mb card, which is terrible for games. The other problem with the videocard is that it uses up your normal ram (which you only have 64 megs of) to create the videocard's RAM. This is really bad, as your normal RAM is not as fast as normal videocard RAM, thus slowing down your pc even more.
Now let me rant on about other parts of the pc. For instance, there are no serial ports! So, if you are stuck with old equipment which uses a serial-port, you have to buy a $50,- convertor to use it, and then the question is if the converter will actually support that piece of hardware (friend of mine had to get rid of his internet this way!). The machine only has USB ports, and I think it has 2 PS/2 ports for mouse and keyboard. The mouse you get with the machine is strange as well, it doesn't have a "rolling-scroll-button" noooo, it has a button which senses your finger tilting it, sort of like those little green things they use on some laptops, just a lot bigger. Now, if you thought that wasn't enough negativity, you should hear about the keyboard. If you are a regular pc user, and have always used a standard US layout, you're gonna hate this one! It was made to save space, but cramming all the buttons closely together, and alternating the height of the buttons to sort of create a difference between the different sections of your keyboard. Buttons like HOME, END, DEL, etc are all in very akward places, it does not allow for rapid typing. Unless one would get used to it ofcourse.
For all these reasons I would recommend this machine for women. It looks great, is easy to use (multimedia keyboard with extra buttons, only USB for easy installing) it takes up barely any space, when it's off people hardly notice it, fine for writing email and doing standard office work with. It even has a network card installed and can be booted from the network!
So, if you are not going to be playing any hardcore 3d games or using 3d programs like 3d studio max and do not mind sacrificing a little power for great looks, this pc is for you. Other wise, stay way clear of this one!
Recommended:
No
Amount Paid (US$): 1699
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Celeron
Processor speed: 601-700
RAM: 64
Internal Storage: CD-ROM
Hard Drive (GB): 13-20
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Epinions.com ID:
snek_one
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Location: The Hague, The Netherlands
Reviews written: 32
Trusted by: 3 members
About Me:
PHP/MySQL Dev, Database Designer, System Administrator, Gamer
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