PC Nextday Zoostorm 52-4201 review

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Verdict:

The Zoostorm doesn't look exciting, but it's the most powerful notebook in the group and has no significant downsides.

Review Date: 15 Aug 2007

Price when reviewed: £499

Reviewed By: Seth Barton

Our Rating 5 stars out of 5

ExpertReviews Award

PC Nextday's Zoostorm may not be much to look at, but it has an outstanding specification for such an inexpensive notebook.

Features

The Zoostorm is probably the blandest-looking notebook in the group, but it has a decent selection of ports, with four USB2 ports, a memory card reader and an ExpressCard/54 slot.

There's also an optical S/PDIF output, so you can connect a surround-sound amplifier.

The 160GB hard disk provides plenty of space to hoard media files, and as the Zoostorm comes with Windows Vista Home Premium, you can browse them with Windows Media Center. The built-in speakers are poor, however, and sound tinny and distorted.

The display isn't very bright and white areas have a bluish tinge. Our greyscale test looked speckled, too. It's not a bad screen, but the Acer's is better. It's the only screen here with a matte finish, so it doesn't produce annoying reflections under office lights - but its colours aren't as deep as those on glossy displays.

Performance

The Zoostorm's Intel Core 2 Duo T7100 is one of the latest Core 2 chips, with a faster front-side bus than previous designs. Running at a fast 1.8GHz it produced an impressive overall score of 142 in our application benchmarks. It also includes Intel's new GMA X3100 graphics chipset. This couldn't run our 3D benchmark at the usual settings, but without anti-aliasing it scored 5.5fps. Unfortunately, it's still some way short of being of able to run modern games.

The battery lasted a reasonable two and-a-half hours in our test. It'll suffice for use in the garden, but not for regular mobile use.

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