Samsung NC 20 12 Inch Laptop

By Helson Xu

Samsung NC20

Laptop has become one of the importan t tool in the life. It is used by a lot of people from younger until the oldest. Samsung is one of the best laptop producer always want to be the best in produce laptop. Now laptop producer is competite in laptop design. I will review one of the product from Samsung.

Samsung NC20-21GBK 12.1-Inch Black Netbook – 6 Hour Battery

Specification

• VIA Nano ULV U2250 1.3 GHz Processor, 800 MHz Front Bus speed
• 1024 MB DDR2 RAM
• 160 GB (5400RPM) Hard Drive
• Microsoft Windows XP Home, 6 Hour Battery (6 Cell Lithium Ion)
• 12.1 Diagonal WVGA (1280 x 800) SuperBright Display

Pros:

• 12″ screen with 1280×800 makes this comparable to a “real” laptop as far as screen real estate goes. Quite helpful if you work with programs that demand lots of space, and makes web browsing much easier. I use a lot of software that just cuts off dialog boxes half-way on my Eee, because of the tiny 1024×600 resolution. NC20 solves this problem, and many others.
• Very light, and while it’s indeed 12″, it still feels small enough to take anywhere you’d take a 10″ netbook.
• Battery really does last almost 6 hours.
• Doesn’t get very hot (compared to most laptops). Fan kicks in a bit more than I’d want it to even in an air-conditioned room, but it’s never felt uncomfortable placing on my lap while doing ordinary tasks. You’d still want to put it on a lapdesk/laptop cooler when watching movies though.
• Easy to upgrade RAM and hard drive from the bottom.
• Cheap. (can buy 3 of these for the price of one MacBook Pro)

Cons:

• Bad keyboard layout (no Windows key on the left side, Backtick/Tilde key directly left of the spacebar, half-sized left/right keys share space with PgUp/PgDn).
• Power cable plug is on the middle of the right side. If you use a wireless mouse next to the laptop, the cord will get in the way quite a bit.
• The hard drive that it comes with is pretty slow (benched at ~52MB/sec buffered reads, whereas my Eee’s drive benches almost 70MB/sec). I opted to try a OCZ Vertex 2 SSD instead, which made startups insanely fast – even faster than my C2Q Q9550/10k RPM Raptor desktop setup).
• Atheros AR5007EG card usually had bad performance with my D-Link DIR-655 router, even with the latest drivers. From a local SMB server, I get read speeds of 1.5-2MB/sec, with lots of packet loss – where my Vaio (Intel Wifi 5100) and Eee (also Atheros AR5007EG) don’t. Streaming H264 movies is pretty bad, even with a 3,000ms buffer.
• Hardware acceleration on video playback makes Xvid, MPEG4, etc. is decent; however, I have mixed reviews about how H264 fared. Generally, there would still be dropped frames (<10%) even when played off your hard drive. Of course, you typically don’t buy “netbooks” for these tasks, so I’m not complaining too much about it.
• Video sites using Flash are disastrous. YouTube only plays in SD (HQ usually drops to < 10FPS, HD is a slideshow). Sites using H264 codecs in their Flash movies just were miserable to try watching on. Given the prevalence of Flash and H264 in Web 2.0 sites, it’s my opinion that Flash performance is also a very important factor of “netbook” performance. After all, netbooks are supposed to be for browsing the web. Shouldn’t have to switch to a desktop just to watch some short clip on [...] without major lag.
• Sites with a lot of text and JavaScript (e.g., Slashdot) scroll a lot slower on Firefox than on my Eee 900HA, which uses the Atom N270 CPU and GMA950. I guess this is where the Via chipset just doesn’t excel at.

Here my short review about Samsung NC20 12 Inch laptop from Amazon store. If you are interesting in shoes, watches and jewelry you can visit my other sites in Shopping Area. There are a lot of guides and tips and also best review of best product from Amazon store.

Samsung NC20-21GBK 12.1-Inch Black Netbook – 6 Hour Battery		Price = $438.99