A great laptop for the price (Samsung Q45 Aura T7100 Duke)

Name: whatanoldbag

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Product:	Samsung Q45 Aura T7100 Duke
Date:	27.01.08 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: small, light, great spec, looks great

Disadvantages: screen is not massive

I just bought this for £749 from amazon. Delivery was quick and ordering easy (as I usually find with amazon) - this laptop arrived ready to go - I just switched it on!

It looks great, is very lightweight and has a lot of welly under the boot!
It has an Intel Centrino Duo processor and 2GB ram which I think you need if you are going to run Vista.

It has a 160 GB hard drive which seems plenty big enough to me!!
It also comes with a multiformat DVD burner so even if you run out on your 160 GB you can always store to DVD. If you want to access a flash card you can just plug yours in and go - it is compatible apparently with SD, MMC MS, MS PRO and XD, but I only have SD which works great, but I obviously can't comment personally on the others. You don't need to load a driver or anything.

The manufacturer says that this has Silver Nano Technology which means they have apparently sprinkled nano-sized silver ion powder on the keyboard and palm-rest and this will ensure your system will remain completely bacteria free. I can't say until I read that I ever worried about bacteria in my system , but it's good to know there will not be any!
One other feature of this laptop is a 1.3 Mega Pixel Digital Motion Camera to use for video-conferencing or live messaging. This is the first time I have had a built in camera in a laptop and it is so much easier than having to plug in a separate one. so far so good with it - it works well, and the picture quality is the best I've used anyway.

This lap top also has something called High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) which apparently is a new form of mobile broadband that is capable of transmitting data at high speeds. The manufacturers reckon that this gismo improves downlink capacity, and so removes a potential bottleneck, and they sell HSDPA as something that allows you to enjoy large-scale multimedia downloads, such as DVD-quality movies and interactive multimedia games, with high-speed wireless Internet access comparable to speeds of fixed-line ADSL. I have BT broadband at home (which is ASDL) and it is supposed to deliver up to 8MB though it never does, and I don't really think of it as mega-fast, but it's OK! All I can say about this HSDPA is that the new laptop downloads stuff about twenty times faster than my desktop (poor old soul) so in that sense it lives up to it's hype, this HSDPA thing, and my son's new laptop is about half as slow downloading the same stuff as this one. His is Core Duo, not Core 2 Duo so it is a less powerful chip, and his only has 1GB of RaAM, so I can't swear it is this HSDPA which is making it faster, or something else in the laptop but I can tell you it is fast - a couple of minutes for a DVD from I love Film, for example.
For those of you who like specs this laptop has:

* Intel® CentrinoTM Duo (1.8Ghz)
* 2GB RAM
* 160GB HDD SATA
* DVD/RW Super Multi DL Drive
* Wireless 802.11a/b/g LAN
* Webcam
* Bluetooth
*Graphics Controller: Intel X3000 128MB
* Fax / modem - 56 Kbps
* Stereo speakers
* Windows Vista Home Premium
* Display 12.1" WXGA (1280x800) Super Bright Gloss
Weight 1.86 kg
Manufacturer Warranty 1 year warranty

So far so good with it - I've only had it a week though, so can't comment on reliability. It looks great, is really lightweight and powerful and though there are cheaper laptops out there I think this one is great value for money because of what you get for the price. It is the first core 2 duo I have had and I am so impressed with the speed and ease with which it flips from programme to programme - even just keeping loads of tabs open is a piece of cake - and Windows Vista is good at that. Still getting to grips with Vista, but that's another review...
Battery life is BRILLIANT - I've had almost 5 hours out it ! I know it's new but that's impressive.

It is the second Samsung I've had and I love the layout of the keyboard etc - so much better than Dell, which are a bit functional (though good value for money). It's quite small which makes it light and easy to port about, and the screen is big enough, though obviously if you want a bigger screen there are loads out there larger. I expect the smallish screen improves the battery life. The actutal viewing on the screen is good though - it is one of those very glossy screens which I find very easy to use.

So all in all highly recommended for an ultra-portable smallish laptop with a great spec and loads of power, at a reasonable mid-price.

Summary: Well worth the money

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