Samsung Q320
The Samsung Q320 is a surprisingly fast, powerful and hard-working laptop. It’s not surprising because it’s made by Samsung (they’ve got a great record of making high performance laptops), but it’s a bit of a shock to see these specs on a laptop that’s under £600. It’s excellent value for money, and great for someone that wants a laptop that’s able to perform, that they can take with them easily and that doesn’t cost them the earth.
The price gets you a 2 GHz Pentium Dual Core processor (which isn’t spectacular, but is still pretty good), a 500 GB hard-drive (which is capable of holding an absolute ton of films and music) and 4 GB of RAM (which is just plain excellent). The specs are brilliant, and despite the slightly dated processor it’s still more than capable of running incredibly intensive programs with speed and ease. The 4GB of RAM makes a noticeable difference in the speed at which this laptop boots up and handles day-to-day tasks, and using the machine you’d never guess that it was at such a low price. The performance with everyday tasks very nearly matches the high spec 13 inch Apple MacBook or the Dell XPS M1330 (both in the same class as Samsung’s Q320, but both a bit more pricey).
There’s very little bad to say about the Samsung Q320 – it’s such a great value, well built and high performance laptop that it’s difficult to fault. It’s slightly heavier than Dell’s 13 inch XPS effort (the brilliant M1330) but not heavier enough for it to be offputting. The screen isn’t quite as sharp as the 13 inch MacBook Pro, but then very few screens are – and the display on the Samsung is still very, very high quality. The worst thing I can say about the Q320 is that it attracts fingerprints. And that’s it. An excellent, excellent value laptop that’s a great size.
