Averatec 6235 Review

I've noticed that no one has reviewed one of these....well its probably good for all of you that you havn't.

I opened the box after ordering one from amazon.com and WOW I was impressed how small this thing is, for being a Athlon64-based machine that is. [8D] I love the remote, the screen, the keyboard, touchscreen, basically the ergonomics are great! Except for the touchpad buttons, which feel very cheap....i'll just use a mouse most of the time.

But problem number one was the wireless. It was not finding my access point in the other room, but my neighbor from across the street! So after playing with it, it finally detected my ap and connected, albeit very very slow. I grabbed the latest windows updates which included a driver update, which helped slightly. I then went to RAlink's site and downloaded the latest driver from them, which fixed all my problems. Stupid Averatec.

By this time, I registered my norton AV 2004 that cam pre-loaded, but it became corrupted after its liveupdate, for unknown reasons. I'll just put my own AV on it later.


Now for the biggie. I was bragging to my friends about averatec how they are a new company but good and they were ooh'ing and ahh'ing over my new notebook, when i decide to show them the mobile theatre DVD feature, by playing a dvd without booting into the OS. I put the DVD in and....CLUNK CLUNK CLUNK. No mas. The DVD drive was toasted.

So I called averatec tech support and after a quick hold time I was greeted by a realtively nice guy who told me to return it to amazon, as averatec would only take my laptop and fix it, no cross-ship or anything. Understandable.

Luckily Amazon.com has a very awesome return policy. I wanted to take pictures and such but I wanted to return this ASAP so i can get my new one and HOPEFULLY be devoid of this issue.

6235....broken...

 

well darn, a notebook that's half dead on arrival. Not a glowing endorsement for Averatec there. And I think you learned a lesson about prepping before a demo by doing a trial run through! Hopefully the one you get next time works, Amazon does have a good policy and this is at least an endorsement for them.

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Well, after a few weeks of playing with my new one with no problems(outside of updating the WLAN drivers from the manufacturers site) I have to say i love this laptop. The instant-on, battery-saving, DVD player feature is quite amazing. While it's MP3 play lacks a randomize feature, it plays every dvd i've tried very very well and can play about 2.5 before the batteries quit. Very impressive. I recommend this laptop very much and also recommend amazon.com as a very good store to buy a laptop from!

6235....broken...