Packard Bell EasyNote TE11HC review

Packard Bell is owned by Acer, which uses the brand for its budget laptop range. The Packard Bell EasyNote TE11HC looks a little old-fashioned with its chunky chassis and silver-and-black colour scheme, but there’s no doubt you’re getting an awful lot of laptop for your money.

The laptop doesn’t even have the near-ubiquitous Chiclet-style keyboard, but this is no bad thing. The broad, flat, closely-spaced keys do rattle around a far bit, but we still found we could type accurately. The cursor keys are oddly small, but the keyboard’s standard layout means all the keys are where you’d expect for easy typing. There’s a full-sized numeric keypad on the right, too. This means that the touchpad is positioned towards the left of the wrist rest but its relatively compact size means we never brushed it accidentally when typing. The touchpad and the buttons below it aren’t particularly sensitive, but they do the job and we appreciated the clearly-marked scroll area.

The laptop has three USB ports, 3.5mm mic and headphone ports and both VGA and HDMI outputs. You’ll probably make good use of the headphone port, as the integrated speaker makes your music sound like it’s playing out of a tin can, with no bass and little mid-range – it’s really only suitable for Skype and Radio 4.

The laptop’s specification is distinctly underwhelming on paper, with a 1.8GHz Intel Celeron B820 processor. Although it’s a Celeron, its performance isn’t much different to that of a low-end Core i3, with an overall score of 22 in our application benchmarks. This is a pretty low score, showing this laptop is really just for web browsing and office applications, rather than anything more intensive. The laptop does have a useful 6GB RAM, but the low-power processor does mean it feels sluggish when you have lots of applications open at once.

Unlike older Celerons, which required separate graphics chips, the D820 has integrated Intel HD 2000 graphics. It’s patently not built for gaming, so we weren’t surprised to find that even at ultra-low quality we only saw a frame rate of 24fps in our Dirt Showdown test at 1,280×720 – it’s casual games only for this laptop.

The EasyNote TE11HC’s 15.6in display has a standard-issue laptop resolution of 1,366×768. It’s bright with vivid colours, and we found the glossy screen coating didn’t cause us too many problems with reflections from overhead light sources. However, blacks aren’t very deep and we found some colours had a mild yellow tint. We weren’t convinced by the display’s colour accuracy, either, as very pale shades were difficult to distinguish from one another. This isn’t a screen for accurate photo editing and printing, but is still a perfectly adequate display for everyday use.

The laptop’s battery life isn’t amazing, at just over five hours, but once again, this is acceptable given the very low price of the laptop. The TE11HC is also equipped with a DVD-RW drive, multi-format card reader and a 500GB hard disk.

All this in a laptop that costs just £260 makes this a brilliant Budget Buy, even though it’s a long way from being the fastest or prettiest laptop around. If you need something a bit more powerful than your average netbook but don’t have much to spend, the EasyNote TE11HC is a great Budget Buy.