Software Side Of Things

Packard Bell sells the .dot with XP Home preinstalled, there is also a collection of useful software preinstalled like a full version of Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 and Microsoft Works 9. There’s trial install of Office 2007, which might be a bit too CPU intensive for a netbook. Norton Internet Security 2008 is also preinstalled and comes with a 90 days trial period, although this is a very user friendly all-in-one package, there are enough more performant free alternatives out there which cover anti-virus/spyware and firewall functionality. Last software package available is an online backup tool called Carbonite which allows you to store your documents online (you got a 4 month free trial here).

For first time users the most interesting application to run will be Packard Bell’s own help and documentation program which will guide you through getting the most out of your system; not very useful for those who are experienced with the Windows OS and PCs in general, but a godsend if you decide to donate this netbook to a friend or family member who’s not all that much into “PééCéés”.



I took an image of the HDD to a network drive and prepped an USB stick with Windows 7 beta installation files; less than an hour later I had reinstalled the .dot with the latest and greatest from Microsoft:



Running a tweaked Vista (dubbed Windows 7 by Microsoft) on a 1.6Ghz Atom (which has about the raw CPU power of a 1.3ghz Pentium 3) went surprisingly well, when running on external power even Aero was working fluently, on battery Windows 7 automatically turned it off to save power. The advanced power states of Windows 7 came in handy, putting the system in Sleep mode was as good as immediate (it turns of the complete system, but keeps the memory under power to save the current system state, after an hour it will write the memory contents to HDD and go to hibernate), waking up from Sleep was immediate too. While this functionality is also present with XP, the Windows 7 setup just felt snappier, and this on low end hardware!

Conclusive Thoughts

The netbook market is very crowded and setting yourself apart from the other products becomes harder every day. The Packard Bell .dot/10 does a commendable job to deliver a multifunctional product with lots of useful features like integrated webcam, large HDD, wifi, multi-card reader, and this at a competitive price of €399 (€50 cheaper than the listed launch price!). Performance wise this Atom based netbook is fast enough to run the latest Windows 7 beta without flaw and its 1gb onboard memory is sufficient to even do a little bit of multi-tasking.

Upgrade options on the .dot/10 are absent, I couldn’t find an easy way to replace either HDD or Memory so that’s definitely a downside if you’re looking for a netbook which you can upgrade in the future.

The next generation netbook are still a few months (if not more) away, with both Intel and NVIDIA pushing to deliver hardware capable of decoding HD content, higher resolutions screens and hopefully also newer power friendly features, as the current Intel chipset used is not the most power friendly out there. Intel did release a newer Atom CPU which is clocked at 1.66Ghz, no surprise that the 60Mhz speed bump is not making any difference performance wise, so those with a 1.6Ghz Atom can still sleep on both ears.

The Packard Bell dot series with 8.9” screen scores high in the looks department and feature wise is quite complete, only lacking Bluetooth; value wise it doesn’t stand out but is not more expensive than the competition. It will come down to personal preference whether or not this netbook is suited for you or not.



We like to thank Tim from Packard Bell and Corneel from NewsEnginePR for allowing us to test the .dot netbook!

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