NEC Versa M160 review

Testing notebooks is a time-consuming task, with battery and application benchmarks to run on every one.

Usually, we'd expect the battery run-down test to take the longest, so it's left running overnight. However, NEC's Versa M160 performed so badly the application test took twice as long to complete as the battery test.

NEC has fitted a paltry 256MB of RAM in this notebook, which is taking economy a step too far in our opinion. An additional 256MB would cost around £25 to fit. This notebook is suitable only for light office tasks and surfing the web. Battery life isn't much better; the notebook lasted a mere one hour and 55 minutes. This is poor for a notebook of this size, and nowhere near the three hours we'd recommend for regular mobile use. The Versa M160 is no good for 3D games, either; the Intel GMA 950 chipset failed to run our Doom 3 test. At this price, though, that's to be expected.

It's not the least attractive chassis we've ever seen, but it's one of the dullest looking. The black plastic casing is unlikely to offend anyone, though, and the design does have one advantage: NEC has managed to fit a number pad alongside the keyboard. It's the first time we've seen this on a 15.4" notebook and is useful if you do a lot of number entry. Surprisingly, the keys are a decent size, but a little spongy to type on.

The 15.4" display is disappointing, even for a budget notebook. The viewing angles are narrow and any movement of your head casts shadows across the screen. Even straight on, the screen is incapable of displaying a clean white. There are four USB2 ports distributed around the edges of the chassis. Digital camera and camcorder users are poorly catered for, as there's no memory card reader or FireWire port. A 40GB hard disk won't hold many media files, anyway. There's no DVD writer, just a DVD/CD-RW combo drive, which limits backups to 700MB per disc. However, this isn't unusual on a notebook at this price.

Toshiba's A120, which we reviewed last month, costs a little less than this NEC. It has more memory, a better display, a memory card reader, longer battery life and a bigger hard disk. With the exception of the Versa's number pad, the A120 is a better notebook in every respect. If you need a keypad, we recommend buying an external USB one, as they're available online for less than £10. In all respects, this notebook is impossible to recommend.