Logitech Launches N200 Cooling Pad in India

Logitech have launched the successor to their N100 cooling pad, the N200, for a retail price of Rs.1,595 with a two year warranty which will be available starting this month. The N200 features a similar padded base so you can comfortably use it on your lap, as well.

Comfortable to use

The Logitech N200 features variable fan speeds (two settings) and a larger fan for more silent operations. The cooler is powered by USB and features rear and side grills for air intake. The front portion is curved a bit, so the laptop doesn’t just slide off when you move. You will be losing one USB port, though and there isn’t any USB hub to compensate that.

Acer Aspire One 522 Netbook Review

Today, we have Acer’s new Aspire One based on the AMD Fusion platform - the Aspire One 522. This 10.1-inch budget series netbook is targeted towards anyone looking for a trendy and compact netbook under 20K. The recently reviewed Asus 1015PX also falls in the same category so let’s see how well the Acer 522 fares against it.

Design and Build Quality
I quite like Acer’s minimalistic design of the 522, it gives the appearance of a slim netbook without any extra fluff. It’s stylish as well, with a lacquer gloss finish on the lid. It will certainly appeal to the younger generation. Despite its slim profile, it doesn't feel very light weight at 1.3kg. There are a total of three USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI port, VGA port, LAN jack, microphone and headphone jack and finally the card reader. The battery protrudes a little from the back giving the netbook a slight elevation. It’s not too much to cause an ugly bulge though.

Good paint job

Opening up the lid, we have a glossy 10.1-inch screen with a rather high resolution of 1280x720, not a common occurrence in netbooks of this size. The glossy effect does introduce reflections but it’s not too bad since the brightness is sufficiently high to cancel most of it. The chiclet keyboard packs in slightly larger than normal keys for a netbook which is good for those with fat fingers. There’s just a power button up top with a blue LED light around it. The Acer bundles a carry pouch and charger along with some instruction booklets and the warranty card.

Overall, I really liked the build and finish of the 522. It’s crafted well from good quality plastics and you wont find any creaks even if you press it.

Features
At the heart of the Aspire One 522, we have AMD’s Fusion APU, the C-50, which is a dual-core running at 1GHz. Rest of the specifications include 2GB DDR3 RAM and a 320GB hard drive, good enough for a budget netbook. The OS is Windows 7 Starter which offers all the basic options you’ll ever need on this machine.

Looks smart!

Acer also throws in some bundled software like McAfee Antivirus (Trial) and Office Starter Edition. They also have some of their own software like Crystal Eye Webcam which lets you capture and record videos and Acer Game Zone which is a collection of mini games. The 522 is also “AMD HD Internet” certified which means the netbook should handle HD media streaming and playback with ease. Finally we have Bluetooth and WiFi ‘n’ built-in as well. Next let’s see how it performs.

Performance PCMark Vantage gave us a score of 1572 PCMarks which is standard for a netbook. The rest of the scores are in the table below. In SiSOFT SANDRA, the C-50 is not able to keep up with the Atom N570 which runs at a faster speed. The same is reflected in our video encoding tests, it took a whole 4 minutes longer compared to the Asus. POVRay fared better since the on-board GPU of the Fusion chip is superior to Intel’s HD graphics. Good GPU performance but can't say the same about the CPU General and Multimedia Windows 7 feels really  sluggish due to the lower powered C-50 APU. When it comes to rendering graphics, the GPU is more than capable but sadly the CPU lacks the raw processing power which is why even navigating through Windows Explorer feels slow and there is a noticeable lag. Applications take longer than usual to open and doing multiple tasks tends to bog the netbook down. Although it may be a dual-core, it doesn't feel like it - in fact the first generation Atom felt snappier. I also noticed the bottom left portion warms up pretty quickly even if the netbook is sitting idle. The problem appears to be the lack of proper ventilation on the side. Coming to the screen, the vertical viewing angles are pretty poor as well although the horizontal ones are slightly better. Chiclet keyboard makes typing easier I set out to test the “HD Internet” certification that the 522 flaunts. After installing the latest version of Flash  for IE, I fired up a 1080p YouTube video . The playback was smooth although at times I noticed a slight stutter in the video. Non-flash based HD videos fare much better though. A quick install of K-Lite Codec pack and I was able to play a 1080p MKV with just 40% of CPU usage. This time playback was smooth with out any skipping of frames and there wasn’t any lag jumping back and forth in the movie. The high resolution screen makes watching movies a real treat, however the sound is weak with the built-in speakers so you might want to use external speakers or headphones. Battery life With Battery Eater Pro, the Aspire One 522 lasted 3 hours, which is lower than the Asus1015PX which managed 30 minutes more. Under normal use, you should expect around 4-5hrs of back up time. This is very average for a netbook and I expected a lot more from it especially since the APU is clocked at a lower speed. Verdict The end user price of the Acer Aspire One is Rs.16994, which is fairly decent for a netbook capable of playing back 1080p videos. If that’s all you care about and don’t mind the overall sluggish performance of Windows, then I’d recommend it. However, if you’re ok with just playing 720p and want a snappier performing netbook then the Asus 1015PX offers better value and is quite a bit cheaper as well. The Acer 522 has some good things going for it like the HD screen, 1080p video playback, HDMI-out and great design and build quality. However, it runs unnecessarily warm, has an average battery life and worst of all, the APU is too weak to handle Windows 7 smoothly

Plextor PX-256M2S 256GB SSD

Solid State Drives were said to get popular and it appears, that’s happening. A majority of people though are still clueless as to what an SSD is. There are those who think of them as external drives or larger capacity flash drives. In India, SSDs are not mainstream or as well known as hard disk drives. We don't blame them for not being aware as SSDs are a fairly recent form of storage as compared to hard disk drives.

SSDs use memory chips instead of a moving platter like the ones found in HDDs, thus they are less susceptible to shocks, are virtually silent, and have lower access time and latency. In addition to this, solid state drives are normally found in a 2.5-inch form factor and are extremely light weight and can also fit into your notebook.

Silent and cool

Plextor is a company we haven’t heard about in a while. They were last known for their optical drives, but have dipped in the SSD market and launched a 2.5-inch SSD in three different capacities. We have the largest capacity model, the Plextor PX-256M2S 256 GB SSD for review.

Design and Features
Internal drives are rarely good to look at, but we were surprised by the design of the PX-256M2S, with its stylish brushed metal exterior. The Plextor PX-256M2S 256GB falls under the M2 Series of SSDs, as the latter half of the model number suggests. You can also find 128GB and 64GB models in this series. The drive features a SATA 6 GB/s interface. With hard drives, there’s little worry of SATA2 being a bottleneck, but with an SSD, there’s a good chance that the drive could be faster. Having SATA3 support is a good thing in this case.

Furthermore, the drive features a Marvell 88SS9174 controller chip, and Plextor boasts of sequential read rates up to 480MB/s and sequential write rate up to 330MB/s with this drive. Read on to see if these real world test scores actually live up to the company’s claims.

The drive also features TRIM command which is basically a command that allows an operating system to inform an SSD which blocks of data are no longer considered in use and can be wiped internally.

256 GB with incredible speed at a cost!

Test Rig Specifications
Processor: Intel Core i7-2600K CPU @ 3.40 GHz
Motherboard: Gigabyte P67A-UD3R
Memory: Corsair Dominator GT 4 GB DDR3 (2 x 2 GB)
Hard drive: WD Velociraptor  300 GB
GPU: Palit GTX560 Ti
PSU: Cooler Master 1000W

Performance The Plextor PX-256M2S solid state drive was put through the regular tests undertaken in our labs, which included synthetic tests, as well as real world file transfer speed tests. To start off, after running each test, the entire rig was completely shut down and restarted, so as to prevent any kind of caching. In addition to this, no application was running in the background and our system was isolated from the network. In the synthetic benchmark tests, we ran SiSoft Sandra and the average write speed recorded was 417 MB/s, which is expected from a high-performance SSD such as this. The random access time noted through the same synthetic test was 60ms. Real world scores were recorded by running a file transfer test from our Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB to the Plextor SSD. We copied test data sets from the WD drive to the SSD and back. There was also a copy test between partitions in the Plextor SSD. In this case, we noticed that the WD Velociraptor tends to be a bottleneck while transferring data, so we used a software to generate a data set and directly dump it on the SSD. The write speed noticed on to the Plextor 256GB SSD was 261MB/s for a single file transfer and the assorted file transfer recorded a speed of 334MB/s. The inter partition file transfer tests were done using a real world data transfer test. For the single 4GB, we recorded an average speed of 146MB/s, while the multiple file transfer test notched an average score of 132MB/s. We tried writing data from the SSD back to the Velociraptor, and noticed a major drop in performance due to the bottleneck. Write tests from the drive were undertaken using the same real world file transfer test and the average speed for a single 4G file transfer seen was 109 MB/s. The multiple 4 GB file transfer came off a little worse with the average speed recorded was 81 MB/s. Slim and light weight Verdict It’s clear that the Plextor PX-256M2S is an impressive performer. The read, write and copy tests were all way higher than any drive we’ve tested, so far. The inter-copy drive testifies that. Usually, even the fastest of hard drives crawl at 40 - 60 MB/s in inter-partition copy tests, but a score of 146 MB/s takes the SSD to a completely new level An MRP of Rs. 27,500 makes it an extremely expensive storage solution. It’s definitely not value for money, even if you consider its scorching transfer rates. Anyone building an extreme high-end performance rig wanting the absolute best of performance and reasonable storage capacity should buy this. The only other way to get this kind of performance might be by using RAID on two or more very fast hard drives.

Acer Launches Happy 2 Netbook Series in India

Acer has launched a new netbook series in India called the Aspire One Happy 2. The new range starting from Rs.15,749, will be available shortly across the country. Acer is targeting the youth, in general with the Happy 2 series, and with good reason, too. The netbooks will come in four fruity colors with a candy gloss finish, so if you are an attention hog, then it will go well with your personality. This will certainly appeal to young girls, college kids and probably Pee-wee Herman.

Available in different flavors

But, underneath all that candy coating lies some serious horse-power. The Happy 2 is powered by an Intel N570 Atom dual core processor that powers Windows 7 Starter and Android. The netbook can dual boot between the two operating systems depending on your needs. Other features include a 10.1-inch screen, 1GB RAM, 320GB hard drive, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3.0. It’s quite light as well weighing in at just 1.25kg. Finally, the bundled battery promises 8hrs of battery life, which is fairly good (if true) for a days worth of work.