Samsung X125 11.6in notebook

Less than the sum of its parts

Upgrade options? The hard drive and one of the memory slots are easily accessible, but what's the point? The X125 has 32-bit Windows 7, so there's not much point upping the Ram, and I'm not convinced doing so would really compensate for the single-core CPU, though an SSD will trim the start-up time down from the minute and a half I recorded - not "fast" really, is it, Samsung?

Could be more compact?

Reg Hardware's standard battery life test - loop PCMark Vantage until the battery dies, with the screen on maximum brightness and Wi-Fi on - saw the X125 give up after three and three-quarter hour, which isn't a bad score, but not a leading one. You'll get around 7.5-8 hours for more real-world usage, I'd say.

The 3DMark 06 score of 1133 is good news for (casual) gamers, and the X125 is well able to pump out both 720p and 1080p HD video to its screen or through its HDMI port. That's thanks to the integrated AMD Radeon HD 4225 graphics core.

Samsung provides a decent bundle of utilities, include the tool Fast Booting SW, which, it claims, makes the X125 fall asleep and wake up more quickly. It didn't seem to make much difference when I tried it, though.

Beyond that, Samsung has included Office 2010 - buy the full release or use a free, advert-filled one - and McAfee anti-virus trialware.

Verdict

Samsung has come up with a sexy-looking laptop for folk who want something more powerful than a netbook but not as big as a 13.3in machine. So far, so good, but then Sammy spoils it by lumping the X125 with a slow, single-core processor. I'd cut it some slack if the X125 was cheap, but you buy the faster, dual-core Pentium-based Acer Aspire 1810TZ for less. ®

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