Packard Bell Dot S review

The Intel Atom N2600 is massively underpowered as far as our benchmark tests are concerned, achieving an overall score of just 11, but it’s actually a decent little processor if all you want to do is browse the web, create documents and watch videos. The Dot S had no trouble playing our 1080p MPEG4 video test files smoothly and has both VGA and HDMI outputs, making it a decent candidate as a portable mini media centre. It only has 1GB of memory, though, which means things can get a bit sluggish if you’re working on large image files, for example. This is probably worth upgrading at some point, particularly as Packard Bell generously includes a copy of Adobe’s excellent Photoshop Elements 9 for free.

Beyond that, the netbook has the usual 320GB hard disk, part of which is occupied by a restore partition, which leaves you with 284GB of space. That’s plenty for files and documents, even taking into account the size of the operating system, which occupies around 40GB. The Dot S comes with Windows 7 Starter. It’s 32-bit, so it can’t make use of more than 3GB RAM and doesn’t allow you to change your wallpaper or visual styles, but its core functionality isn’t otherwise restricted.

Rounding out the specification, the laptop has three USB ports, the usual headphone, MIC and Gigabit Ethernet ports, and 802.11n Wi-Fi. Its battery lasted just under nine hours in our tests, which is excellent. Even so, if you’re after a budget netbook then the Toshiba NB510-11E is better made and a bit more stylish, if almost identical to all other purposes.