Averatec 4265 review

Designed for highly mobile students and cost-conscious business travellers, the Averatec 4265 thin-and-light laptop offers plenty of features, including a DVD burner. While the system demonstrated great battery life, if you have your heart set on a machine with screaming performance, you'll be sorely disappointed.

Design
At first glance, the Averatec 4265's white interior looks uncannily like that of an iBook. The lid of the Averatec 4265, however, is a solid shade of navy blue. Measuring 312mm wide, 224mm deep and 31mm thick, this notebook weighs in at a manageable 2.1kg. The 4265 will slide easily into most bags, and even with its 0.3kg AC adaptor, it won't cause undue shoulder strain.

An unusual size for a thin-and-light, the Averatec 4265's 13.3-inch wide-aspect display features a sharp 1,200x800 native resolution, but it is not as bright as we would like, even at the highest setting. The laptop doesn't have much in the way of multimedia controls: a lone button above the keyboard launches Windows Media Player and it cannot be programmed to open the application of your choice. The keyboard itself is a decent size and has surprisingly deep key travel, though it gives a little too much under heavy finger pressure. The wide touch pad and long, slim corresponding mouse buttons are difficult to control and take time to get used to.

Features
As far as connections go, the Averatec 4265 is adequately equipped for a thin-and-light. You'll find VGA, four-pin FireWire, S-video-out and three USB 2.0 ports, as well as headphone and microphone jacks. The laptop also includes a Type II PC Card slot and a four-in-one flash memory slot that supports Secure Digital, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro and MultiMediaCard formats. The Averatec 4200 gets online via Ethernet, modem, or 802.11b/g Wi-Fi. Our test unit also included a multiformat DVD burner. The system comes preloaded with Windows XP Home Edition, in addition to the Microsoft Works 8.0 mini productivity suite, CyberLink PowerDVD 5.0 for disc playback, and CyberLink Power2Go 4.0 for burning CDs and DVDs.

For a low-priced laptop, our Averatec 4265 test unit came packed with some impressive components. Equipped with a 1.6GHz Pentium M 730 processor, it also has 512MB of moderately slow 333MHz DDR RAM, an 80GB hard drive that spins at a swift 5,400rpm and an Intel integrated graphics chip that steals 64MB of memory from the main system RAM.