Averatec 3360-EH1 Review [Bottom-line: good bang for the buck]

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Co-Published with Laptop Magazine: Solutions for Business and Life.

This 4.6-pound, one-inch thick laptop improves on its predecessor (the 3200) by adding a faster Pentium M processor, 3-in-1 memory card reader, and DVD burner. It also runs for more than three hours on a charge, which is about 30 minutes better than the 3200. Students and anyone else on a budget who want to go wireless without lugging around a large laptop would be wise to snatch this Averatec up.

Powering the 3360 is a 1.6-GHz Pentium M processor. This CPU had no problem in any of the applications we threw its way, from Photoshop to Windows Media Encoder. However, while the hard drive offers a nice 80GB of capacity, it spins at just 4,200-rpm, which slows file access just a bit. On the upside, the system’s 512MB of DDR memory made multitasking a breeze. The 3360′s MobileMark performance rating of 179 bore out this impressive processing power.

One amenity you rarely see at this price is the multiformat DVD burner. It writes to DVD+Rs at a speedy 8X, which makes the omission of a FireWire port so perplexing, since you’ll need that to capture footage from a digital video camera before you can edit it and burn it to disc. We recommend making a FireWire PC Card adapter your first upgrade.

Pros
• Compact and lightweight
• Good battery life
• 3-in-1 memory card reader
• Multiformat DVD burner

Cons
• No FireWire
• USB ports too close together