REVIEW - Pioneer Computers DreamBook Light IL1
Summary: The seven-inch screen quality here was well below standard and not good enough . Its styling is quite rough and performance very slow however the battery life and storage on offer are excellent.
Price: $498 inc. GST (with Windows XP Home Edition)
Rating: 5.5 out of 10
Of all the netbooks I’ve seen so far, this is the one I’m least impressed with.
The seven-inch screen is small enough as it is but it only delivers 800×480-pixel resolution, which is a 16:9-aspect ratio. The problem was that when we came to change the resolution, the only options the Windows XP Home Edition operating system would allow us was either 1024×768 or 800×600-pixels, both 4:3-aspect ratio options.
Now you can imagine how good an 800×480-pixel LCD screen looks when you try to squeeze a 1024×768-pixel desktop onto it - not great at all. You need to have “large fonts” switched on all the time just to be able to read anything on the screen.
However, there were other things that didn’t impress us.
First up, the keyboard on this model is just incredibly small - I have largish hands and I couldn’t type on the unit’s keyboard without hitting bum keys all over the place.
The processor here is a very slow 1GHz VIA C7-M. Thankfully, the unit came with 1GB of memory otherwise Windows XP Home Edition would have been even slower than it already was. On our testing, it’s encoding speed was less than half that of the MSI Wind’s 1.6GHz Intel Atom N270 processor and is the slowest encoding PC - and netbook - I’ve come across to-date.
While there’s not much good news here, there is some - at least the unit comes with a 40GB hard drive which is useful storage. The other thing is both a positive and a negative at the same time.
...