17 out of 17 people found this review helpful.
Great value in a compact small laptop
Date of Review: Nov 15, 2007
The Bottom Line: Great value in a stylish, small subnotebook.
Bought this laptop on a whim for under $600 to replace my personal (non-company) boat-anchor which was suffering old age being more than 5 years old. I was surprised by the build quality of this Everex. Cast metal light alloy frame, sub 4lbs, dual core cpu, two batteries included in the box, DVD burner, and more. Typically, anything with something similar is priced well over $1000. The display on this is also sharp and very tight, so much so I could drop the system font down a size for everything and function just fine with its 1280x800 pixel screen. Had no problems shrinking the Vista partition down and then installing a recent (but not old) distro of Linux. You'll need to be careful about older Grub installs by Linux that could render then Vista partition inaccessible!
Had to do minor hacking to get the Wifi to work in anything but Windows and Apparently, this uses a Ralink RT73 chip (internally connected via USB - NOT PCI-express!). The latest version of most popular Linux distros should just work. I also tried installing with Solaris x86 and this works just fine as well but with no Wifi support yet. I was able to get an experimental driver that tickles the wifi and passes traffic so we might expect to see Wifi supported on this in official Solaris releases soon. And if you're wondering if this laptop can only support 1GB, well, the specs are wrong. I've been running fine with a single 2GB Patriot DDR2 5300 sodimm and it's perfectly stable as it should be since the chipset is Intel ICH7-Mobile.
Overall, it's stylish, runs fast, and is hard to beat the price-performance here.
