Quaddra
XT - PCW Magazine
(Sep '03)
Editor's Choice
It’s an old joke, but the Rock Quaddra XT isn’t so
much a desktop replacement as the desk itself. Well perhaps it
isn’t a joke - in this case it’s almost true.
Most
of the features are familiar to us from other notebooks in the
group, so we’ll skim through them quickly; the desktop Pentium
4 2.6GHz processor, 512MB of DDR memory, 60Gb Fujitsu hard drive,
combo optical drive, Radeon 9000 graphics package and 15in screen
with 1,400 x 1,050 resolution are all relatively commonplace.
They’re all components but there’s nothing there to
grab our attention.
This
is clearly a decent desktop replacement notebook that offers nothing
you can’t get from Fujitsu-Siemens or Mesh. And then you
look at the battery performance graph and everything is turned
upside down. Somehow Rock has managed to produce a huge notebook
with decent performance that lasted for two hours 41 minutes in
our battery test, which matched the AJP 1.4GHz Centrino.
That
means this desktop replacement can be used in most environments,
although you wouldn’t want to carry it very far at that
weight. It doesn’t have wireless Lan, and it’s loaded
with Windows XP Home, but there’s another clue that the
prime market for the Quaddra XT is home users. In the centre of
the open lid there’s a tiny webcam - useful if you
want to prove to your partner that you really are stuck in a Travel
Lodge on a business trip and aren’t out having fun.
The
drives are on the left-hand side and the ports are all along the
back. Oddly there is nothing on the right-hand side.
In
addition to the battery life and all round performance, Rock has
installed Ability Office and supplies an excellent three-year,
C&R warranty. There’s that whole position of the enter
key’ issue of course, butt he most important thing is that
Rock proves it’s not essential to buy a Centrino to get
excellent battery life, so long as you can live with a heavy notebook.
PROS |
|
Amazing
battery life; three-year C&R warranty; good performance |
VERDICT |
|
The
battery life lifts this desktop replacement into a completely
different arena |
FEATURES |
|
|
|
5/5 |
PERFORMANCE |
|
|
|
4/5 |
VALUE
FOR MONEY |
|
|
|
4/5 |
OVERALL |
|
|
|
4/5 |