A Look Inside

The original Dot series came with 1gb and 160Gb HDD; while this is quite sufficient for most, memory and HDDs have become affordable, so an upgrade should not be out of the question. Unfortunately in case of the Dot we tested last spring we noticed the following:



Packard Bell definitely took these remarks into consideration as we’re happy to report that the Dot M/A features easy access to HDD, memory and expansion card areas.

The photo below of the bottom already reveals what is removable, no “warranty void if broken” labels visible here, but those might be present on retail versions; so please take this into consideration if you happen upon them. We would suggest upgrading any of the parts inside, only after the warranty of 2 years has expired. With 2Gb RAM and 250Gb HDD already inside they should last a while.



If you’re adventurous, here is what the DOT M/A looks like without the black panels. Memory bank supports DDR2 SO-DIMM:



Two Mini PCI Express slots; one holds Wireless card, the other can hold your favourite 3G access card. Since this is a dev. Machine what you see here might have changed before it went retail.



The HDD is secured in a separate metal casing, you can fit any 2.5” SATA disk in there; an upgrade to SSD will definitely boost performance.




BIOS Options

When you enter the BIOS of this Athlon powered netbook you do get some settings to fiddle around with, none related to overclocking, but you can tweak the integrated GPU settings quite a bit:





Setting USB as first boot device can come in handy when you want to upgrade the preinstalled OS to something different.