Averatec Notebook Review

CNET took a look at the 3715 from Averatec, makers of "no frills" budget notebooks.

By today's thin-and-light standards, the Averatec 3715's smallish 12.1-inch display, with its low 1,024x768 (XGA) native resolution is unimpressive--more expensive thin-and-lights often have higher-resolution wide-screen displays--yet it's sufficient for doing work on the road. The two speakers, placed underneath the laptop, emit typically mediocre sound.

For a thin-and-light, the Averatec 3715 offers a good selection of ports, jacks, and slots. A four-pin FireWire port, a Type II PC Card slot, a 4-in-1 flash-memory card slot, a 56K modem jack, and an Ethernet jack line the left edge alongside the system's built-in DVD burner. The opposite edge includes a VGA port and three USB 2.0 ports, at least one of which should have been placed on another edge for more flexibility. Finally, headphone and microphone jacks sit on the front edge.

The Averatec 3715 ships with the Windows XP Home operating system, plus a handful of CyberLink multimedia apps for burning and viewing discs. As you'd expect from such an economical system, the Averatec 3715 lacks a productivity suite.

A thousand bucks won't buy a bunch of top-notch laptop components, so it makes sense that the Averatec 3715 carries a low-budget AMD Sempron 3000+ processor, 512MB of slow 333MHz memory, and an integrated VIA S3G chipset that borrows 32MB of main memory to use as VRAM. Even so, Averatec throws in a single-layer DVD burner, 802.11b/g wireless, and a big (albeit slow) 80GB, 4,200rpm hard drive.

From the $950 price tag, it's not really a bad deal if you want something light, and with a bigger hard drive, and DVD writer. It's a much better deal than the $500 notebooks Dell is selling with a 30 GB hard drive, and a read only DVD drive. I think CNET was a little hard on it.