An elegant netbook

Samsung NP-N140

It has a compact and stylish body with rounded edges, smooth lines and a metallic-coloured cover, and weighs in at just 1.27 kilograms. It is available in blue, violet and red. The one tested here was a shiny violet colour, and looked really elegant.

The N140 has everything a netbook should have. It has 1GB of memory and a 250GB hard drive, which is more than enough for storing documents and e-mail.

Its 10.1-inch LED back-lit screen is in wide 16:9 format with 1,024 x 600 resolution, and is really good for reading Web pages and watching videos.

I found that the screen was really bright during the test, although it is not glossy.

The NP-N140 has wireless LAN of 802.11 b/g/n protocol and a Bluetooth 2.1 connection.

Chatters should love the integrated webcam for use with Windows Live Messenger or Skype applications.

The netbook also comes with utilities such as Easy Battery Manager, Easy Display Manger and Easy Network Manager.

The N140 is powered by an Intel Atom N280 processor running at 1.66GHz and uses Windows 7 Starter edition.

Windows 7's built-in performance assessment utility did not give high scores, apparently because the netbook is not designed for heavy multitask applications like high-performance notebooks and desktop computers.

On a scale from 1 to 7.9, the N140 scored 2.4 for processor performance, 4.5 for memory performance, 2.1 for Windows Aero or graphics-transitional effects, 3 for 3D business and gaming graphics and 5.8 for hard-disk performance.

However, it scored quite well when benchmarked by PassMark Software's performance tester.

It got an overall PassMark rating of 177.9 out of an average 200. The CPU scored 244.7 out of 300, and it got 88.7 out of 90 for 2D graphics.

Casting aside all the technical figures, I found that the N140 started up fast enough, and I had no problems running Office 2007 applications. But since the Atom processor is designed for single-task performance, you should not run several applications at once or the performance could suffer.

I could view videos from Youtube.com without problems, and the built-in speakers with SRS surround sound effects sounded very good.

Its keyboard is large enough for comfortable typing and the touchpad responded well.

The Samsung NP-N140 retails for Bt13,900, excluding VAT.

Key specifications: Samsung NP-N140 netbook

Operating system:  Windows 7 Starter 

Processor: Atom N280 (1.66GHz, 512KB L2 Cache, 667MHz) 

Main chipset: Intel 945GSE + ICH7M 

System memory:  1GB (DDR2 / 1GB x 1) 

Display: LCD 10.1-inch WSVGA (1024 x 600), non-gloss, LED back light

Graphic processor: Intel GMA 950 with shared memory

Storage: 250GB HDD

Communication: Wireless LAN 802.11bg/n (1), Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR