Excellent first impressions (3100BDF) (AJP 3100B BDF Series)

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Product:	AJP 3100B BDF Series
Date:	14/07/00 (67 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Price, specs, service

Disadvantages: No inbuilt modem, Region locked DVD

This will only be a brief review because I have only recently bought this machine. I'll go into more detail once I have discovered more about it.

When my laptop computer broke I decided rather than just get it fixed, I would buy a new one. I wanted to upgrade, my hard disk kept running out of space (and I used compression) and felt that the world was turning to DVD. Looking through ads was long and complicated so I sent out a request to quotes from various companies. Several weeks later and some companies still haven't replied! AJP were quick to respond (as were several others) but their price was far cheaper than I had exepcted. Although saying that I did spend extra because I included two years insurance.

The price below is for a 14.1" TFT XGA, PIII-600 speedstep, 8Mb AGP ATI video card, 128Mb memory, 12 Gb hard disk model, without faxmodem but including 2 yrs all risk insurance, delivery and VAT. This was fractionally more than the second cheapest quote for an equivalent machine, which did not include insurance. What especially please me was that it arrived two days after making the order.

Keyboards are either soft or clicky. I haven't used a soft one in a while but the AJP machine has one of those. It is probably better not to be putting too much pressure on a laptop anyway. The keyboard is solid and doesn't dip inthe middle some of the keys are tiny. Where my old laptop doubled up, this one doesn't making for the smallest keys I've seen on a laptop for Delete, Insert etc. Worse still delete is on the bottom right of the keyboard, before the cursor keys. This will take a lot of getting used to, I have been doing Ctrl-Alt-Break to reboot!

The screen is large and clear and the case seems sturdy. Rather than black it is a silvery gray with a grrenish tinge. It does look stylish. Although I haven't put it to much use it seems to be incrediably fast. This could be the processor (m
y previous machine was only a PII-233) but as it includes large file copies I would have to say it recommends the hard disk highly too.

The DVD sadly is region locked, as they all have to be from January 1st, 2000, and it is a model for reach there is currently no known cure. If anyone knows how to change the Torisan (Sanyo) DRD-U624 please let me know. As with all drives it allows only five changes (although I can't see the point of that) so surely if you set it to region zero before it locks then there would be no problem?

I'll just have to see how the machine performs over time, I haven't checked battery performance out, although I don't expect it to reach two hours, but I am impressed so far.

As well as the computer itself, you also get driver disks, MPEG II software (DVDExpress), Windows 98 v2, a carry case, powere supply and manual (although this is somewhat useless).

Summary: