- Fairly Inexpensive
- Good Battery Life
- Lots of USB Ports
- Lackluster 3D Graphics
- No Integrated Flash Card Reader
- Trackpad Somewhat Difficult to Use
- AMD Turion 64 ML-32 (1.8 GHz) Mobile Processor
- 1GB PC2700 DDR Memory
- 100GB 4,200rpm ATA Hard Drive
- 8x DVD+/-RW DL Burner
- 17" WXGA (1440x900) Widescreen LCD Display
- ATI Radeon Xpress 200 Integrated Graphics with 128MB Shared Memory
- v.90 56Kbps Modem, Gigabit Ethernet and 802.11b/g Wireless
- Six USB 2.0, One FireWire and One Type II PC Card Slot
- 15.5" x 11" x 1.5" @ 7.7 lbs.
- Windows XP Professional, WinDVD, Nero 6 Suite, Norton Internet Security
12/5/05 – Intel's Pentium M processor has dominated the portable market for some time, but WinBook has chosen to go with the new AMD Turion 64 ML-32 (1.8GHz) mobile processor for the WinBook A730 desktop replacement. In performance tests, it is about equivalent to a Pentium M 740 processor. The system also comes with a full gigabyte of PC2700 DDR memory. It would be nice to see it use the faster PC3200 DDR instead.
Storage is quite good with the WinBook A730. The large 100GB hard drive provides plenty of storage space even though it is not as fast due to its 4,200rpm spin rate. An 8x DVD+/-RW dual layer DVD burner lets to system create music, movie or data CDs or DVDs. Most notebooks now have integrated card readers, but the A730 does not have any. The six included USB 2.0 ports do allow for a large number of peripherals to be attached.
Desktop replacements are very much about their graphics capabilities and the A730 is a bit mixed. The large 17” wide screen is very bright and readable, but the integrated ATI Radeon Xpress 200 graphics will prevent it from doing many 3D graphics. This puts it at a disadvantage against many other desktop replacements, but the A730 is priced much lower than its competitors in this regards.
One thing that the Pentium M did very well was battery life, something that AMD chips were not very well known for. Thankfully, the A730 surprised me with a quite good battery life lasting a full two hours and 20 minutes during DVD playback.
