Group test: Hi-grade Notino W5600

Hi-grade’s Notino W5600 is a perfectly respectable laptop system, although it doesn’t have any special features that help it to stand out from its rivals.

The Notino is neatly designed, with a silver exterior and a nice matte-black finish on the inside. The keyboard has a good feel to it, so business users who are going to be doing a lot of word processing or spreadsheet work will feel quite comfortable with it.

Hi-grade bundles a copy of Open Office with the Notino, so you’ve got a basic set of office software to get started with if you don’t want to fork out for a copy of Microsoft Office.

There is also a protective carrying bag included with the Notino. However, it’s fairly solidly built, so you can just slip it into a briefcase or backpack when you’re ready to go travelling, and it should cope with the rigours of the road pretty well.

It weighs less than 3kg, even with the mains power adapter in the bag, so it’s no problem to carry around. Both Ethernet and wireless networking features are built in, making it easy to connect to the internet either at home, or in Wifi hotspots around the world.

When you’re finished working you can sit back and fire up a DVD, as the 15.4in widescreen display is bright and clear, and provides good image quality for watching movies. Battery life is quite respectable too – it can’t match the outstanding battery performance of the Toshiba and Fujitsu laptops, but the Notino’s two hours of DVD playback will be enough to get you through a few episodes of Lost on a long plane journey.

The Notino only provides marginally longer battery life – a mere 11 minutes longer – when running less demanding productivity software, but it still lasts for more than two hours, so this isn’t a major weakness.

Not surprisingly, though, 3D graphics performance does prove to be something a weakness. The integrated Unichrome graphics processor, which uses 32MB of shared system memory, simply failed to run any of our 3D tests at all. However, poor 3D performance is one of the few features that all these low-cost laptops have in common, so we can’t criticise the Notino unduly on this score.

Performance in other areas is more respectable, though still far from outstanding. The choice of a Celeron M 420 processor running at a mere 1.5GHz means that the Notino has the lowest level of all-round performance in this group. This is backed up by 512MB of Ram and a good sized 100GB hard disk.

To be fair, the Notino will certainly be more than adequate for running business software, surfing the web and sending emails. It should be able to handle digital photography too – although it’s a shame that there’s no card reader or Firewire available for quickly transferring video clips or photos from a camera.

The CPU may have a problem, though, when it comes to handling large video files and video-editing work. The Celeron processor certainly couldn’t be described as obsolete, but choosing a model that runs at just 1.5GHz means that the Notino is going to struggle more than its rivals. It also lacks the additional features such as built-in webcams or Firewire interfaces that are fairly common on notebooks these days.

This article is part of a group test of laptops.
See also:

Introduction
Acer Aspire 5101 AWLMi
Asus A6Rp-AP026H
Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505
MSI Megabook M670
Toshiba Satellite Pro A120
Graphs and table of features can be read via our pdf downlaods above.

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