Kogan Agora Netbook review

My Agora Netbook came by courier today. The first noticible thing when opening the box is the lack of any manuals, fliers, special offers, discs or other such things. The box simply contains the Agora netbook, a Australian mains power adaptor and the battery. Upon lifting the netbook out of the box and fitting it with it's battery I was very impressed with it's weight; or perhaps I should say, lack there of.

Weighing in at just 1.4Kg the Agora netbook is quite well suited to travel. The 10.1 inch screen is large enough to comfortable do most tasks on a computer (I'm writing this blog entry on the netbook). I have the standard Agora which comes with 1Gb of 667mhz DDR2 RAM, but the Pro comes standard with 2Gb. Upgrading my netbook to 2Gb of RAM will be a simple enough process however, as I've seen brand new 1GB suitable modules for $19.95 on ebay.

The 160Gb hard drive is MUCH appreciated, and while it's not a SSD unless the netbook really starts cooking then you still get completely silent operation. The Hard drive itself makes no noise, the only noise you do get is a very quiet buzz from the system fan. The fan also does extremely well, as even pushing the netbook to it's limits it remains at a temperature comfortable to sit on my lap.

The inbuilt webcam and mic are extremely handly, not just for video chat, but vodcasting in a mobile environment becomes very simple. The inbuilt wifi is very responsive and gives me a great signal anywhere in my house. I haven't tried it out back, but I'm pretty sure I could travel anywhere in my garden as well. The inbuilt speakers give amazing sound for their size. There is NO distortion, even when they're at their highest setting. With the aide of the Realtek HD Audio manager they do a great job of giving virtual 3D sound.

All in all with an intel atom 1.6Ghz cpu, 2Gb of RAM (in the pro version) and a 160Gb hard disc it's a netbook well ahead of the curve. And at a price of $450 it's hard to find something better at a similar price. But it's not all good news, this netbook won't appeal to everyone. It comes with gOS preinstalled, which to me is not only a pretty annoying OS, but relies far to much on Google apps for my liking. Personally, due to googles privacy policies, I tend to keep as far away from google apps being on my hard drive as I possibly can.

Being a Linux distro as well it means none of your windows apps will run natively on the system. You can get some to run through wine, but it's always a bit of a hit and miss deal. For most users it's going to be a learning curve that really isn't worth the hassle. For this reason I formatted the drive and installed Windows XP. The process of installing Windows from a USB stick (there is no optical drive) is surprisingly easy, you simply get a tool like win2usb to format you usb stick, transfer the windows cd to it and make it bootable. After that it's pretty much the normal way of installing windows except you plug in the usb instead of slipping in a CD.

I chose Windows XP because;

• I have a copy of Windows XP
• I don't really see anything in Windows 7 that makes upgrading worth while
• Windows 7 requires a minimum of 1Gb RAM to run, and as my netbook has only 1Gb of RAM, I didn't want to chance it running slow.

The drivers are a bit of a hike to find, and there are a few tricks to get the wifi and webcam to work. For example to get the webcam to work you have to go into system --> device manager --> click on the webcam and click to upgrade the driver. You have to let it search the internet to find the drivers and then it's all set up. Kogan don't actually provide the drivers in their download which is disappointing. Also I only seem to be getting 2 hrs max out of the netbook in battery mode, but I'm not sure if I only have a 3 cell battery so that may be the problem. I'm going to buy a 6 cell battery ($65) from the kogan website and see if that fixes the issue.

Also the space between the keyboard and touch pad is very compact causing accidental touchs of the pad while typing. By default the touch pad has touch clicking enabled which means accidental touchs result in some pretty odd things happening. You need to manually go through and turn this setting off. These however are all quite minor problems, and still leaves the Agora ahead of the pack. Kogan is also an Australian brand which is always a big plus in my book.

In sumary it's definitely not a netbook that will suite everyone, but if you're looking for a styish netbook that gives you leading features at a budget price it's certainly worth at least a look at.