Comments on AV 4155

Refurb 4155 arrived, and, by and large, I'm very impressed with it. It's small, light, reasonably well built, and the screen comes unbelievably close to giving my VAIO a run for it's money!

Only caveat is the fact that the built in wireless would not pick up my network. It might be that it simply didn't like my Netgear router- I booted into a Linux livecd out of curiosity and it picked up my neighbour's linksys network with no trouble; Windows is usually more intermittent about picking that up- possibly they've managed to hide their network from win pcs, but linux still sees it... I dunno. No big deal anyway- I simply plugged in my belkin wireless dongle and got on to the wifi network that way.

Other quibble is the fact that the battery won't charge beyond 75%. I know these laptops aren't renowned for their battery lives, but is there any way round this? No big deal if there isn't; assuming the laptop runs happily without a battery, I may remove the battery, replace the foam wad that came, and just run it off A/C. Certainly the power pack is the smallest I've ever owned on a lappy.

I also disabled unnecessary hardware and did some general tweaking; after that, I have to say that I found the system surprisingly fast and responsive, even in comparison to my Centrino Duo machine- and this is running on battery power, after installing all my software!

I had some misgivings about the slight creaking I could feel at the top of the lid when opening and closing the laptop, so I did a little modifying- placed a thin piece of metal over the 'Averatec' plastic bit and over onto the screen side; covered the metallic finish lid (didn't like the feel of that plastic at all) with adhesive book-wrapping plastic/paper, and put a strip of foam mounting tape just above the top part of the screen- the snap the laptop closed with worried me too- a little. Result: laptop looks better, and there's no creaking at all now when opening and closing, and closure is much gentler, while still being tight! The machine feels as solid as any of my other laptops now (Tosh, Sony, IBM), and it wasn't exactly bad to begin with.

In a word I'm chuffed. For a laptop that cost less than £500 (£388 excl VAT) it's brilliant.

I'm definitely a happy camper! Of course, time will tell whether I continue to be, but touch wood....