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Latest LG Xnote P300 Laptop With LED Backlit Display

We spotted the P300 last December when it was scheduled for its launch in Korea, but LG has finally done the decent thing and brought it across to Europe. In the process it has also given the specs a decent upgrade, possibly making LG's the 13.3in notebook to have, until every other manufacturer makes similar refreshes to its lines. The upgrades in question see the processor upped from a 2.4GHz T7700 to a similarly clocked T8300 Penryn chip, hopefully offering better battery life and performance. System memory is up to 3GB, with an unspecified NVIDIA graphics chip, most likely a GeForce 8400M, providing graphics acceleration.

Build and Design

The LG P300 is a slim and compact design that could fit very well with the Mac book Air and ThinkPad X300. The notebook is very thin, and has no bloated plastic to round out edges or even out parts of the chassis. The screen bezel is very thin, with the overall LCD section being no more than a few millimeters thick. In terms of design it looks and feels a lot like a Fujitsu business grade notebook, not counting the colorful "red wine" lid design which looks a bit like a violet zebra.

Build quality is nothing short of top notch. The chassis feels extremely rugged, with no flex or sagging anywhere but the thin LCD lid. The main body and keyboard surround is metal alloy, and the LCD frame is sturdy black plastic. One thing some advanced users will notice from the pictures is this notebook lacks any panels on the bottom for RAM, CPU, or HD access, which is instead located under the keyboard. In some ways the solid bottom section does reduce flex and creaking which might come from separate panels rubbing against each other when carrying the notebook around.

Speakers

The speakers on this notebook were more than adequate for listening to music, watching a movie, or playing video games. Treble and midrange was clear, and like the majority of notebooks bass was completely lacking.

The headphone jack provided clear and hiss free audio, making it a perfect alternative for private listening.

Performance and Gaming

The power of this 3.6 pound notebook was nothing short of phenomenal. With a 2.4GHz Penryn processor and NVIDIA 8600M GS this thing screamed compared to anything else in this weight range. I could play Portal at native resolution and at medium settings and have enjoyable frame rates. One performance enhancing item I did not see on this notebook was a 7200rpm drive, but the system performed well enough where that downside was glossed over.

The panel is still the same 1,280 x 800, LED-backlit affair seen elsewhere, so no improvement there, and making up for the lack of a built-in DVD drive; a USB-powered model is bundled. Weight wise the LG P300 keeps itself less than 1.7Kg, which while not Toshiba R500 levels of lightness is certainly not going to cause undue strain to anyone carrying the system around regularly. Oddly, the P300 isn't showing on LG's UK site quite yet, but will hopefully be rectified soon. Price wise the rest of Europe will be forking out €1,599 which is in line with similar systems.

This notebook has the following specifications:

* Intel Core 2 Duo T8300 (2.40GHz/ 800MHz Front Side Bus/ 3MB L2 cache)

* Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit

* 2GB DDR2-667 dual-channel RAM (2 x 1GB)

* 13.3" WXGA (1280x800) Glossy

* Nvidia GeForce 8600M-GS graphics card with 256MB dedicated memory

* 250GB Fujitsu 5400rpm Hard Drive

* No Internal Optical Drive, External USB DVD-RW Drive included

* Intel Wireless Wife 4965 AGN (802.11a/g/n)

* Bluetooth 2.0+EDR

* Built-in 1.3 mega pixel web cam and microphone

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Need a good pci wireless adapter?

I live in a basement and the router is located on the 2nd floor. ( floor above the main floor)
Right now my current wireless adapter has a signal strength of either poor or fail.
So i need something give me better signal strength but also something stable.

my laptop has intel centrino ultimate-N 6300 AGN and there is a clear noticeable higher performance in terms of connection stability and speed. Is there any wireless adapters that are equivalent of that for desktops?

You're looking at the wrong end.

Buy a high-gain antenna for your router. It can boost the signal getting to your laptop dramatically.

Here's an example of just such a beast. There are many different brands ... some as low as $20.... some as high as $200.

http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0305649

Unboxing My Dell XPS M1530