Before I’ll go into detail about the Packard Bell Easynote TK85-JO-062GE I’ll discuss why I choose it and what went into the process of making the decision.
I bought my previous notebook in 06 and was super happy with it at the time. It was an Asus Z82J and it did the job.
Back then I was an avid PC Gamer and the notebook allowed me to play all my games easily. As things changed and I started to do video/photo editing as a hobby I went back to a desktop PC to get the necessary power, but my notebook still came in handy in various situations and I still used it a lot. Since I had a powerful Desktop PC I barely needed my notebook for gaming anymore, and besides some older games/emulators it was mainly used for Internet and watching movies. Mid 09 the display died and I replaced it, which made it run perfectly smooth again. In mid 10 a lot of things happened at the same time, from the battery shortening it’s power to the notebook getting incredibly loud while playing videos and almost every 3D game crashing from time to time. This finally led me to the decision to get a new notebook.
Finding a new notebook is not as easy as it may sound. Originally I wanted my new NB to run Windows XP, since I needed it to run certain games/programs. That alone is not much of an issue, there are still plenty notebooks that run xp, or at least offer the drivers to install XP on them. The real issue was that I wanted a graphic card that is capable of running StarCraft II at least on medium settings with more than 20 fps, since I am at a friend’s house a lot where we play some games from time to time, and being able to play SC II together is a blast. And that led to my main issue: The NB’s I found were either not able to run SC II the way I wanted it to run or were not able to run XP. So I had to make a choice: No StarCraft or I had to find a way to fix my issues with Win 7.
I chose the later and spent a full week trying to get KotOR (my main reason for XP) to run on 7. The result was that KotOR II ran pretty well while the original game kept crashing. Luckily Valve’s Steam service offers a version of KotOR that runs on Vista/Seven. So all issues fixed I only had to choose a notebook.
I was mainly looking for a notebook that wasn’t too expensive, had a strong enough graphic card to run some games with decent settings, good battery life and a decent amount of RAM and a good processor too let me use Photoshop on the go. My final decision was heavily influenced by pricing, since amazon.de offered the Packard Bell EasyNote TK85 100 bucks cheaper, and I was really impressed by the Books hardware for it’s price, I ended up buying it:
Since I don’t have the time to write a full 2+ pages review right now, or even the technical knowledge, I’ll just list some pros and cons:
Pro:
- Nvidia Optimus technology* which allows great battery life while still having a great graphic card for games and HD videos
- Silent, and I mean silent unless it’s playing back an HD video or I’m playing a 3D game I can not here it, and even if it does it’s still pretty silent compared to other Notebooks I heard
- Intel Turbo Boost which allows to boost your processor up if you need the power while still running at a pretty low speed to maintain battery life when you don’t
- Fast. This might just be me and the fact that my old NB was pretty much broken and 5 years old, but given the fact that it’s a 550 Euro Notebook it’s extremely fast in terms of everyday browsing etc.
- Running games on pretty high graphic settings. Again this is great given the fact, I can run Starcraft 2 on high settings with 70 fps, more than I hopped for.
- The fact that the Display is mirroring is not half as annoying as I thought it would be, even though I miss my old NBs not mirroring display…
- The Keyboard is pretty solid and it’s a huge plus that it has a build in num block, the touchpad is also pretty solid
- It’s just a solid product, it does not look cheap or cheaply put together.
- It ships with a full version of Adobes Photoshop Elements and MS Office 2010 Starter (it also came with some other software I don’t care about)
Cons:
- 16:9 Display (and the fact that it’s mirroring)
- Mono Speakers
- Recovery is only possible via a hidden partition on the HDD, you have to burn discs yourself, which takes a good 2 hours
- Drive is pretty loud while burning
Overall: I could care less about 16:9 (though I obviously prefer 16:10 for my desktop, but that’s because I’m actually working with my PC 99% of the time, for watching videos, browsing and playing some games 16:9 is more than fine), almost every Notebook has a mirroring display and I can still switch the display. The speakers are more than fine for watching some videos, and I have headphones for everything else. It came with discs to burn all the recovery stuff on, and you can easily recover without them. I don’t use discs for anything besides watching DVDs, and I have those on my external harddrive. So all my cons don’t really concern me, while I love it for every single pro. It does what I want it to do and I have not regret my choice yet.
I almost forgot the specs:
§ Intel i5 460m processor (2 cores, 4 threads)
§ Nvidia Geforce GT 420M (1GB Vram)
§ 4 GB Ram
§ 320 GB HDD
§15,6” LCD Display (1366 x 768 HD resolution)
§ 1.3 MP Cam
§ Duallayer DVD Drive
§ 3x USB 2
§ 1x HDMI
§1x VGA
§ 1x WLAN bgn
§ 1x Gigabit LAN
§ Speaker Out & Mic In
§ SD Slot
§ 3 hours battery life (got it to 5+ hours by disabling display light)
