A matte-black block, this desktop replacement laptop makes a clear statement: You do not care about looks. And that isn't even the "I don't care about looks" deliberateness of ThinkPads. You simply do not care how your laptop looks. Unfortunately, although the NBL5100 has a lot of elements I enjoyed, its operating system holds it back. In hardware, the NBL5100 packs a punch. You'll find a lot in this machine.
It measures 14.7 by 9.9 by 1.7 inches and weighs only 6.1 pounds--that's a lot of weight, but relatively light for the desktop replacement class. It feels a lot lighter than it looks. Inside it has an Intel Core i7-640M CPU running at 2.8GHz, 4GB of RAM, and Nvidia's Optimus technology, so you have both Intel's default HD graphics system and the more-powerful GeForce GT 330M discrete video processor. Putting a damper on the whole thing, however, is Micro Express's pointlessly cheap decision to ship the laptop with 32-bit Windows 7. That means only 2.3GB of the RAM is usable.
The OS strictly limits the machine in the future, too. This is the single worst element about the NBL5100. Micro Express tells us, though, that a 64-bit upgrade is available.
The 15.6-inch screen offers full 1080p resolution, 1920 by 1080 pixels. Vertical viewing angles aren't great, but horizontal viewing angles are fantastic. Colors don't really pop as much as I'd like. The real draw here is the screen size and resolution, framed nicely by a clean black plastic bezel. Thanks to Nvidia's Optimus technology, you won't have to worry about your graphics card's chewing up the battery when you're just chugging through work, yet you can still play around with some computing muscle. On our WorldBench 6 tests, its score was a quite respectable 118; the battery life of 2 hours, 36 seconds, while short, is typical for the category.
It measures 14.7 by 9.9 by 1.7 inches and weighs only 6.1 pounds--that's a lot of weight, but relatively light for the desktop replacement class. It feels a lot lighter than it looks. Inside it has an Intel Core i7-640M CPU running at 2.8GHz, 4GB of RAM, and Nvidia's Optimus technology, so you have both Intel's default HD graphics system and the more-powerful GeForce GT 330M discrete video processor. Putting a damper on the whole thing, however, is Micro Express's pointlessly cheap decision to ship the laptop with 32-bit Windows 7. That means only 2.3GB of the RAM is usable.
The OS strictly limits the machine in the future, too. This is the single worst element about the NBL5100. Micro Express tells us, though, that a 64-bit upgrade is available.
The 15.6-inch screen offers full 1080p resolution, 1920 by 1080 pixels. Vertical viewing angles aren't great, but horizontal viewing angles are fantastic. Colors don't really pop as much as I'd like. The real draw here is the screen size and resolution, framed nicely by a clean black plastic bezel. Thanks to Nvidia's Optimus technology, you won't have to worry about your graphics card's chewing up the battery when you're just chugging through work, yet you can still play around with some computing muscle. On our WorldBench 6 tests, its score was a quite respectable 118; the battery life of 2 hours, 36 seconds, while short, is typical for the category.
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