Quaddra XT

PCW Magazine (September '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.

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