Build-to-order Notebook

The Clevo-3220 is the latest addition to the growing channels market in India is notebooks. Intel recently introduced this concept, called BTO (Build-to-Order), notebooks. In this, an Intel GiD picks up a bare-bone notebook model, and gives its customers the choice of an Intel mobile processor (either PIII or Celeron), amount and type of RAM, and hard disk to put in.

The primary benefit of such a concept is that the customer gets the flexibility to choose the configuration, and a decent price tag too.

Currently, there are 4 GiDs dealing in BTO notebooks in India. We reviewed the one from Nicom Systems, called the Clevo 3220. It contained a mobile Intel Celeron/700 processor with 128 MB RAM, 10 GB hard drive, and an onboard ATI graphics card with 8 MB video memory. The notebook also had onboard sound and modem. It’s a pretty light and sleek looking model, and the most attractive part is its price tag of around Rs 72,000. This is a pretty good deal for budget-conscious

buyers.

Other features are also pretty good. The video card allows you to hook-up an external monitor to the notebook, and even let’s you span your desktop across it, and the notebook’s 13.3” XGA TFT screen. There’s a PS/2 port for connecting an external mouse or keyboard. It also has a hot-swappable bay for connecting either a CD-drive (24x) or a floppy drive. The notebook has a pretty light power supply, and the notebook itself weighs just 2.2

kgs.

On the performance front, the notebook gave superb performance, scoring 22.4 and 23.9 in Business and Content Creation Winstone 2001. Both these benchmarks measure the performance in running productivity and content creation applications, such as MS-Office 2000 and Adobe Photoshop. Another important feature for a notebook is the back-up it provides on batteries. Here, the notebook managed to stay up for about an hour and forty minutes on its NiMH batteries, using the BatteryMark 4.0.1 benchmark from eTesting Labs. This is an average back-up time. Recharging time, though was pretty long, where the notebook batteries took several hours to completely recharge to 100 percent.

The notebook comes with a compact travel bag, making it easy to carry around. Other features in the notebook include one

S-Video port for TV-Out, an InfraRed port, a PCMCIA slot, and a serial and parallel port. Software includes Win 98 or

Me, McAfee antivirus and StarOffice. 

Overall, a great buy for budget-conscious buyers, considering the price and performance.

Anil Chopra at PCQ Labs