Watford Aries MSI_1100_CS_10 review

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Verdict:

The Aries is a neat ultra-portable notebook without the big price usually associated with tiny computers. Its lacklustre performance might not bother mobile users, but its limited battery life certainly will.

Review Date: 21 Aug 2006

Price when reviewed: inc VAT

Reviewed By: Chris Finnamore

Our Rating 3 stars out of 5

Review
Specs

This is the smallest and lightest notebook in the test, but to achieve this Watford has made compromises that won't suit everyone.

FEATURES

The Aries' 12.1" screen is the smallest here, but its widescreen resolution of 1,280x800 makes it suitable for watching DVDs. Its small size won't suit those with poor eyesight, though.

The screen's glossy finish means colours appear richer, but we noticed severe banding in both our colour and greyscale transition tests, so it's unsuitable for subtle tasks such as photo editing. It suffers from distracting reflections under office lighting. Watford has included a large 80GB hard disk and a memory card reader, but no DVD writer.

The keyboard feels responsive with plenty of travel, but flexes when you type. Some of the keys on the left of the keyboard are narrower than the others. If you use keyboard short cuts, you'll be annoyed that the function key is where the Ctrl key should be.

PERFORMANCE

We were disappointed by the Aries' performance. It has 512MB of RAM and a Pentium M processor, but the version it uses is slower than the other Pentium Ms and has a lower bus speed than the HP's Celeron M. It scored 61 overall in our application tests.

The SIS integrated graphics chip isn't up to playing modern games, so the Aries failed to run our Doom 3 benchmark. Although not as short-lived as the Toshiba, the Aries ran for just one hour and 42 minutes in our test. This limits its usefulness away from a power socket.

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