Customer Reviews

Averatec AV5500-EA1 15" Laptop (Mobile AMD Sempron processor 2600+, 256 MB RAM, 40 GB Hard Drive, DVD/CD-RW Drive)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

I shopped for a (under $1000) notebook for my wife basically for her digital photos and her Girl Scout files, I was very disappointed in what the local stores had to offer.

PROS:

This laptop looks great, has a nice large keyboard, and the 15 inch XGA display is beautiful with up to 128MB shared memory!

The front 4-in-1 Media Card Reader is impressive and works flawlessly.

It comes with only 256MB ram, but is easily upgraded with PC2700 type (333mhz) 200-pin DDR memory.

The AMD Sempron 2600+ Mobile Processor is quick and pushes this laptop to achieve the desired results (photo editing and word processing).

I turned it the first time and within a few minutes I was already surfing the web as it easily found my router, and my network.

The sound on this laptop is much better than all of the other similarly (and some higher) priced laptops I looked at.

We watched a DVD the first night and had absolutely no complaints (and this was still using only the original 256MB of memory)!

Comes loaded with Roxio CD burning software and Microsoft Works 7.0, and PowerDVD.

CONS:

A bit larger/heavier than what I was originally shopping for, but I couldn't pass up on the great deal. And at 6.8 lbs, it's really not that heavy.

The video is NOT for gaming! But like I said, you'll have no problems watching movies and if you use the S-Video (TV Out) Port on a flat screen... WOW!


SUMMARY:

We have nothing to complain about.

All around great "budget" laptop.

Doubling the memory to 512MB is a must!

This laptop will do everything except render the latest games.

What a Bargain!

Since there is $150 rebate on this model which brings the pric down to $680, it is a reasonable price to pay to entry level laptop so I just bought one. This is the review after I have used this laptop for several hours. The reason I rate this one as 4 star will be explained shortly. I have previously used IBM T40 so many comparisons will be made against this model (yeah, IBM T40 is far more expensive and supposedly better, but ...).

I will start with the good aspects.

1. 15 inch bright LCD screen. The screen's quality can rival many entry level standalone LCD monitors. The viewing angle is sufficient, although not great (certainly not 170 degree as many LCD monitors exhibit), but better than T40's, which gets a very narrow viewing angel. Narrow angel means that when you look at the screen at certain direction (not straight front), screen exhibits color/brightness distortion.

2. Silver metallic look. Look more cool than a pure black one.

3. 3 USB sockets at parallel placement. T40 has 2 and they are placed one on another (plugging two at the same time will be a minor hassle).

4. Builtin 1396 firewire.

5. Very quiet hard disk operation. I can hardly notice any noise from it - on the down side, I don't know how much disk activity is going on. T40 and many desktops have very noticeable noise.

Now comes the short sides.
1. Very mediocre sound performance especially from the headphone output. There is even noise coming out of that which indicates poor shielding of electronic components and wirings. T40's audio performance is so-so but it does not have noise at least. So don't expect to listen to MP3/CD at high quality from the builtin audio output.

2. The default CPU speed is at around 800MHZ, roughly half of what the CPU can deliver. I have to change power management option to let it run at full speed after I notice it is not that fast.

3. The default memory is only 256MB. It is not really a thing to blame since at this cost, it is unlikely it gets more. Expect to spend another $80-$100 to buy 512MB memory to get a reasonable performance (I noticed the hard disk spins all the time if multiple apps run at the same time).

4. The keyboard does not feel as good as T40's, but not too far away and too bad. Just acceptable. Location of PgUp/PgDn/Home/End is very different from others, so it takes sometime to get use to.

5. The default action for the laptop to enter into hibernate mode when you close lid is very inconvient. It should just turn off LCD monitor and do nothing else (that's T40's behavior). So I have to change that through Control Panel.

6. It does not have similar thing as tracking button like IBM T40 does. It is a small button you can massage to get very quick mouse movement - an extremely useful feature if you don't want to use an external mouse.

7. The mouse tracking area's default behavior is very counter-intuitive. When you tap on the tracking area, it takes that as a click on the mouse button. I got this wrong almost everytime and had to redo many stuff. It is difficult to use and easy to get wrong. This is a feature that should not be turned on by default. Fortunately I can turn this off.

8. The LEDs for disk/battery/wireless/etc. information is locatedd at left bottom side (if you face the screen). This is an area usaually covered by your left hand and you can not see them if you are typing. Why can't they be put on a forward location? That would be much easier to see.

9. Again on the same area - like most other people, I wear a watch on my left wrist. And the metal band just wears down that area quickly - only after a couple hours' use, I can see scratches. Either Averatec should use a stronger paint on this or they should just put a plain stronger plastic without paint.

So given the money I paid, I will keep this laptop since none of them are critical, and I will get use to them eventually. I have not used the service so can not comment on it. A 4 star rating should be what this laptop deserves. If you are just looking for an entry level laptop, and don't care about these shortcomings, then this model is just right for you.

I can't believe someone would return this fantastic bargain of a computer over the CPU speed before doing a couple of searches on the web. Granted, I do find this to be weird and I think Averatec should put a guide to doing this on their site. Anyway, let me explain how to fix your CPU speed. Are you excited?

1. Go to the Averatec website and click on "customer care" on the bottom left side. Then go to downloads and download the CPU driver and run the program.

I think this is where some people, including me, got confused and Averatec is to blame. It turns out you're not done installing. You have to goto the next step:

2. Go here: C:\AVERATEC\DRIVERS\CPU and click setup.exe for the driver. This installs the driver.

3. Reboot the computer.

Now check control panel/system/general and the CPU speed should read 1.6 GHz as it does on mine now. I'm not sure if it's pyschological or not, because I didn't find it to be that slow before I did this, but it really does seem to be running quicker now - though I'm no expert and didn't do official tests before and after.

If that didn't work, you may also need to do the following:


Goto the power management section of the control panel and change the setting to "always on".

Goto control panel, add/remove programs, and click add/remove Windows components to the left. Wait a minute, then you just click next next until it's finished...

Or try rebooting a couple of times after installing the driver. It didn't work the first time I rebooted but it did the second for some reason.

Anyway, that's it. After that you have nothing else to worry about. I've been using this sweet machine for the past week and have been quite impressed. I can't believe all you get for the money.

The con: the graphic card is awful. Don't plan to play games on it.

The design. This is a beautiful machine. Very bright, sharp screen. And it's ultra thin. It's not ultra light, however, but not overly heavy either. I can't get over the bargain price, really. Amazing.

It's quick, especially after the adjustment, and seems very stable using a variety of applications including Photoshop 8.

The 802.11g 54 MB/s built-in Wireless. This thing is flying online right now.

The built in card reader is very nice. Goodbye external card reader.

My personal favorite is the fan button. You can turn off the fan on this machine whenever you want and the machine becomes dead quiet. That's one of the reason I sold my Compaq, which was so noisy.

TV Out. You can watch all those special, downloaded movies on the TV...

I hope this was helpful. I highly recommend this unit.

Bought this for Christmas for my wife.
First turned it on and got low CMOS battery warning. Thought it was because it was first time turning on. Not so, CMOS battery is out.
No support on Christmas.
Otherwise unit seems to work fine. I was concerned about 256K memory, which it shares with the video (32/64/128) but at 32 setting seems to be fine for surfing the web, plaing text twist and solitare, listening to mp3's.
6.8 pounds feels like a feather compared to my desktop replacement unit (Compaq R3030US), and the battery life seems to be in the 3 plus hour range so far, which also exceeds my desktop replacement unit easily.
[...]...got screewed on the [...], I bought it with the $50 one, and then the next there was an additional $100 one that I did not qualify for, and did not want to play around with since it was so close to Christmas.
Can't wait to see how good support is for the CMOS battery. Hopefully something I can fix myself with out voiding the warranty.
Well they wanted me to return it to Amazon for the CMOS battery. When I opened the case, it had come loose during the shipment. Not that easy to put back in place and almost had to void my warranty by removing a sticker to get it back in place.
Then 3 months later the thing dies. Got stuck paying for shipping to them, to find out it takes them 4 - 5 days just to check the unit out before the list anything on the RMA status. I thought I was onto something with this unit, but with prices dropping everywhere I would go somewhere (anywhere) else for a cheapo laptop. This company is not the way to go.

Better-looking than previous Averatec offerings, the AV5500 is great for web-surfing... and perfect as a companion at the cafe.

The AMD Sempron mobile-edition processor is no slouch, but it's best for Internet applications rather than CPU-intensive programs like Adobe Photoshop or Windows Moviemaker. Its 256MB of RAM, the absolutely minimum for Windows XP, also means it won't run Microsoft Office well, but is adequate for Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, etc.; just make sure you don't run too many applications at the same time, or the machine will feel very sluggish.

As others have pointed out, you should adjust the power option in Control Panel and also download an updated driver to get the maximum performance out of the AMD CPU. The Averatec is configured to run at battery-saving speed out-of-box, which also means slower performance. If you have the money, I highly recommend you upgrade the RAM to at least 512MB, for a high-octane boost in performance.

The Averatec is great for the cafe because it has a nice styling and built-in wi-fi. I do think it's a bit on the heavy side, esp. if you have to lug the AC adapter along -- the built-in battery lasts about two hours with wi-fi on and screen set to mid-brightness (and CPU set to power-saving mode). On the other hand, it has a big, bright screen (even at half-brightness) and decent keyboard, and its good looks will beat out the Dells and Gateways others have to live with. It also lets others know you are unique and value- and style-conscious!

Since Averatec is not a major brand (although they are reportedly growing fast), you should probably trek over to Staples or Best Buy or Circuit City and take a look at the physical machine before deciding whether you like it or not. But for less than $700, you are getting a lot of bang for the buck, and the machines I've had have not developed any problems so far. (Knock on wood!)

After many weeks with my 5500 I agree with existing reviews - the Averatec 5500 is a good laptop for the money (after rebates). I've used a few laptops over the years, and this one appears quite nice. Just three additions for anyone wanting a critical review:
1. Although the screen is quite nice on the whole, the screen on my 5500 has slight vignetting (darker shading) at the lower corners. It's not significant, but it is noticeable.
2. The built-in wireless sensitivity does not match that of my Motorola, AT&T or SMC PCMCIA cards. This is disappointing when trying to catch an 802.11b/g signal across the house.
3. The touch pad is not as easy to use as others (e.g., Dell, HP). I've spent a couple hours trying all kinds of touchpad settings, but can't get it to perform as well as I would expect.

To all three points I say: "What do you expect from something designed/built to be inexpensive." Four stars for good value.

When I got my unit, it was reporting only 398Mhz, when the processor is a 1.6 Ghz!...not good...

What you need to do is uninstall the CPU driver that comes with the unit...go to www.amd.com...click on downloads and utilities...click on Mobile Sempron...download the AMDPowerNow utitlity and either one of the CPU drivers (one is an exe and the other a zip)...load the CPU driver...reboot...but before you load the PowerNow utitlity, right click on the icon and in properites, click the Compatability tab and set it to Win2000...for some reason, if you do not, and you run the utility, it says that it does not support this operating system, though the AMD site says it's for XP...then run the utitlity and reboot...

Running CPU-Z, it report 798...run an intensive app (I used CPU burnin) and it shoots up to 1598...that's what you want to see!

I've been toying with this laptop for several hours. $749.99 with rebate.
It fairly fast despite only 256 Meg RAM.
Display is crisp and bright.
I've successfully installed Microsoft Office and Paintshop Pro,
copied a music CD, watched a moovie, transferred files from a Sony Memory Stick to a USB drive, listened to mp3 and ogg vorbis files, and surfed via the wireless connection.
I'm going to recommend buying several more of these to a little nonprofit board I belong to.
What's not to love?

the reason why windows shows the processor running at 800mhz is because of cpu throttling, your cpu slows down when it is idling or not much cpu power is needed in order to decrease temperatures and save power... once you start up a program the cpu will speed up to it's max speed. you can use a realtime cpu clock like wincpuid or amd's dashboard to monitor the processors speed

I do like Averatec, I also love AMD processor, as far as My concern AMD is the best one and for a real decent price. I got this computer and a week after the leds cover just jumped out its position, I glued back several times, until I got tired, and finally the cover get lost. Some days after, the lock button also disappear, so mi pain began. I placed a service request trough the Averatec Page, no answer so far, I called several times just to hear music, I faxed a request and up to now SILENCE is the
answer I have. I opened the unit and rebuild the lost parts my self, but that is not the general idea of Customer Service .....