Powering Up

The DOT M/A is the only Dot to come with Windows Vista, the 2gb memory will definitely come in handy here, but the Athlon CPU is really a bit underpowered to run this OS. The Radeon is fast enough for all the Aero effects, so that’s definitely a plus.

We hope Packard Bell upgrades this system to Windows 7 soon, and offer the end user the possibility to use XP on there, if they so desire, in the end XP is still the most battery friendly Windows OS out there.

The Windows Vista install comes preloaded with a few applications to get you started; the Adobe image editor certainly will come in handy, the MS Works package is also more than what most require from a “Office” suite. The 1366x768 resolution is pleasure to work with on the 11.6” LED screen which is bright and offers excellent image quality in darker environments, it’s a tad reflective though and this is a downside when you use it on the road in the open, when the sun shines in, gets a bit harder to view the image clearly.




We used a Windows 7 RTM 32-bit DVD to do a clean install (copied the source files to USB, made bootable with winsetupforusb) and are happy to report that all integrated hardware was detected (wireless, wired network, mouse, webcam, microphone), even the Radeon was supported, but we upgraded to the latest support ATI Catalyst using ATI MobilityModder.

Size Comparison: Packard Bell DOT M/A vs MSI Wind U100

The MSI Wind U100 is an Intel Atom based 10” netbook, comes with measly 3-cell battery, later revision luckily had 6-cell. Size wise the Dot M/A is bigger. How much bigger? Let the pictures do the talking:







Performance numbers next ->