A great ultralight.
Written: Aug 26 '03 (Updated Jun 09 '06)
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Pros: Ultralight! Ultrasmall! Great screen! USB 2.0
Cons: Odd keyboard layout, limited battery life without optional battery, no CD-RW drive.
The Bottom Line: An excellent laptop for people who have to carry them around all the time. I highly recommend this laptop.
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| sff6's Full Review: Sharp Actius UM32W (PC-UM32W) PC Notebook |
The Sharp Actius UM32W is a great ultra light laptop. It's dimensions are 11.3" x 9.13" x 0.77" and weighs just over 3 pounds. Barely bigger than an 8.5x11 sheet of paper and less than an inch thick.
The laptop comes with Win/XP Pro, a 12.1" screen, 256mb ram, 1Ghz Pentium III M, 40GB harddrive, integrated 802.11b, USB powered (no AC adapter required) external CDROM drive. It also comes with Ethernet, built in modem, 2@USB 2.0 ports, firewire port, 1-cardbus slot, 1-compact flash slot, and a dongle for both VGA monitor and Parallel port. It also comes with a small AC power adapter, a slim (1hr 20min - my usage) battery, a restore CD and a tool to upgrade memory.
I have added an additional 256mb of memory, extended life battery, 3 year warranty, external mouse, USB-Serial adapter, DVD-CD/RW drive and notebook sleeve.
This is a great laptop for traveling light. Even in the sleeve I can fit in in my bookcase and it doesn't weigh all that much. The built in 802.11b works great. Everything worked great out of the box. I have been very happy with the laptop.
Sharp is somewhat of an unknown in laptops, but their support is stellar. I had the opportunity to call them several times and I was never on hold for more than a minute. In each case the person I spoke to was able to deal with my problem and resolve it, I never had to wait for someone more technical.
The Laptop is quite fast, although it seems to slowdown somewhat when on battery, although this is not objectionable.
The USB 2.0 ports are great and let me use an external DVD drive. The keyboard layout is a little bit odd and I occasionally hit the wrong keys. The dongle would be a pain, but I never use a monitor or parallel printer. The extended battery is useful if you want to run unplugged for any extent of time. The laptop does not include a Win/XP pro CD. (Addition 11/04 - I recently used the dongle to connect a VGA monitor. I was really impressed, because with Windows XP I was able to use the monitor and the LCD concurrently. So the desktop spanned both the monitor and the LCD. I thought it could only use one at a time.)
Overall the positives outweigh the negatives and I would recommend this laptop. A competitor to look at is the Toshiba R100, which was not yet available when I bought the Sharp.
Update: 6/2006 - I also had the problem in late 2005 of the unit overheating and powering off. I had the extended Warranty and sent it in to Sharp to be repaired. They did not have any mother boards, so they sent me a refurbished unit with my hard drive in it (so I wouldn't have to reload all software). It now works great as before. The only negative is that it took over 2 weeks to get it back. Still happy with the laptop and use it probably on average 2 hours per day, 300 days per year.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1250
Operating System: Windows
Processor: Intel Pentium III
Processor speed: over 1000
Screen Size: 12 inches
RAM: 256
Hard Drive (GB): 31-40
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Epinions.com ID:
sff6
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Reviews written: 10
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