We didn’t notice any abnormal hot spots around the notebook, on the palm rest or otherwise. This is another testament to the cooling system of the M400, especially in a 12″ chassis. Fan noise isn’t noticeable or even present except under the highest load situations.
Unfortunately the M400 is a mixed bag with regards to upgrades. The hard drive is easily accesible via a removeable panel on the bottom, but system RAM is under the keyboard. Should one get ambitious, the CPU looks to be easily upgradeable as you can see it through grill on the bottom side.
As it turns out, idle drawdown is a very low 7.2 watts, and that is with all the default settings. With the brightness at its lowest (but still completely visible) setting and wireless off, we saw as little as 6.1 watts (see screen capture to the right). That is remarkable. Divide 57.7 watt-hours by 6.1 watts and you get almost 9.5 hours right there. Real world battery life, of course, depends on usage and operating conditions. Running resource-intensive applications such as video will use more power, but depending on power settings, the system will also go into stand-by and thus extend battery life.
What’s almost equally amazing is how the display quality holds up under different lighting conditions. Most transmissive LCDs look great in dimly lit rooms and immediately start washing out in brighter light. Not the MR-1’s. It remains jewel-bright in very well lit rooms, and even if you take it outside into the shade. In bright sunlight it still remains readable thanks to General Dynamics-Itronix’s matchless DynaVue display technology (see related article on DynaVue technology) that combines anti-reflective coating with a circular polarizer. Of course, no LCD display can compete with direct sunlight in terms of brightness.
Instead, the display needs to reduce as much as possible the light reflected back in order to preserve as much contrast as possible. That’s what DynaVue does, and the result is that you can still see the display in direct sunlight. It is no longer as bright and brilliant, of course, Battery ,but you can still see it. The two military pictures above exaggerate direct sunlight viewability a bit, in my opinion, but not by much. What happens in direct sunlight is that the picture is still there and has decent contrast, but it now looks like that of a reflective LCD as opposed to having the vibrancy of a transmissive display indoors.
Acer has officially added two new laptops to its Aspire line and the two could not be more different. The Aspire 3935 is small and nimble, whereas the Aspire 8935G is big and burly. The choice, of course, is yours.
Airline passengers used to play Solitaire on their laptops but today they play DVDs. No netbook offers an internal optical drive, although all have USB ports that support external drives.
For security reasons, some companies disable CD and DVD drives to stop users from loading unauthorized software, so this may be a wash. Enterprises use desktop automation software,not optical disks, to install applications. Traveling employees can go back to Solitaire.
ASUS, one of the world’s leading vendors of computer hardware and portable computer systems is expected to announce the debut of yet another Calpella-based system, in addition to the M60J we mentioned in one of our previous articles. The new rig will be designed to take advantage of the performance features of Intel’s Core i7 720QM processor and provide an alternative for gaming enthusiasts, as it’s meant to be part of the company’s ROG (Republic of Gamers) family of laptops.
M55-T003, M55 WEC 7200, M55 XEP 2500, Samsung M70 Series, M70-1860 Cailan, M70-1860 Cree, M70-T001, Samsung M70 Pro Series, M70 Pro 2130 Bemus, NP-M50, NP-M50T002/SAU, NP-M55, NP-M55T000/SAU, NP-M55T000/SHK, NP-M70, NP-R50, NP-R50CV02/SAU, NP-R50CV04/SHK, NP-R50TV02/SAU, NP-R55