Why You Can Trust CNET Averatec 3715 review: Averatec 3715
This low-budget thin-and-light goes easy on your green.
The thin-and-light Averatec 3715 combines a conveniently compact case and a low $949 price. Its slow mobile performance and abbreviated battery life mean heavy multitaskers, power users, and road warriors should consider the faster, longer-lived (and more expensive) Sony VAIO VGN-S470P. Average home and business users, however, will find that the Averatec 3715 satisfies their computing needs at a budget price.
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Weighing 4.1 pounds and measuring 10.8 inches wide, 8.8 inches deep, and 1.3 inches thick, the white-and-silver Averatec 3715 is among the more demure thin-and-lights we've seen. The Dell Inspiron 700m, which starts at $1,199, weighs about the same, while the VAIO VGN-S470P, starting at $1,499, is a few ounces heavier. The Averatec 3715's petite, two-prong power adapter adds only 0.74 pound to your travel load.
The system's keyboard is wide enough for extended typing sessions, though Averatec should trash one of the two Windows keys to give the cramped arrow buttons more breathing room. We like the full-size mouse buttons and the touch pad, which has handy guidelines along its right and bottom edges for vertical and horizontal scrolling. There's also a useful on/off switch for the integrated wireless radio and a button that lets you throttle down the CPU's speed to conserve battery life. The system never got more than comfortably lukewarm, likely due to the internal fan, which spun almost constantly; thankfully, it's not very loud.
By today's thin-and-light standards, the Averatec 3715's smallish 12.1-inch display, with its low 1,024x768 (XGA) native resolution is unimpressive--more expensive thin-and-lights often have higher-resolution wide-screen displays--yet it's sufficient for doing work on the road. The two speakers, placed underneath the laptop, emit typically mediocre sound.
For a thin-and-light, the Averatec 3715 offers a good selection of ports, jacks, and slots. A four-pin FireWire port, a Type II PC Card slot, a 4-in-1 flash-memory card slot, a 56K modem jack, and an Ethernet jack line the left edge alongside the system's built-in DVD burner. The opposite edge includes a VGA port and three USB 2.0 ports, at least one of which should have been placed on another edge for more flexibility. Finally, headphone and microphone jacks sit on the front edge.
The Averatec 3715 ships with the Windows XP Home operating system, plus a handful of CyberLink multimedia apps for burning and viewing discs. As you'd expect from such an economical system, the Averatec 3715 lacks a productivity suite.
A thousand bucks won't buy a bunch of top-notch laptop components, so it makes sense that the Averatec 3715 carries a low-budget AMD Sempron 3000+ processor, 512MB of slow 333MHz memory, and an integrated VIA S3G chipset that borrows 32MB of main memory to use as VRAM. Even so, Averatec throws in a single-layer DVD burner, 802.11b/g wireless, and a big (albeit slow) 80GB, 4,200rpm hard drive. (An even less expensive model with some lower-end parts is available exclusively from retailer Staples; see our series review for details.)
Performance is the weakest part of the Averatec 3715's dossier. In CNET Labs' tests, the more expensive Sony VAIO VGN-S470P and the Dell Inspiron 700m beat the Averatec by 35 percent and 31 percent respectively (see below for a detailed breakdown of each system's components). Still, the Averatec has enough power for basic productivity applications--just not for intensive multitasking or multimedia work.
Battery life is the Averatec 3715's second-worst trait. In our Labs' drain tests, the laptop petered out after 2 hours, 30 minutes. The Inspiron 700m achieved an even worse 2 hours, 24 minutes, while the VAIO VGN-S470P lasted a longer 3 hours, 2 minutes. If battery life is important to you, consider the $1,484 Gateway M250E, which (with its heavy extended battery) lasted 6 hours, 54 minutes.
The Averatec 3715 includes a standard one-year warranty with mail-in service. Toll-free telephone support is available 24/7 throughout the warranty period. At press time, the company's support Web site didn't list any FAQs for the 3715, though it did offer driver and user-manual downloads for the system. For more detailed information about warranties and service plans, check out Computer Shopper's overview of 37 major computer vendors.
Find out more about how we test Windows notebooks.
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
 | BAPCo's MobileMark 2005 performance rating |
(Longer bars indicate better performance)
| BAPCo's MobileMark 2005 battery-life minutes |
System configurations:
Averatec 3715
Windows XP Home; 1.8GHz Mobile Sempron 3000; 512MB DDR SDRAM PC2700 333MHz; VIA/S3G Unichrome Pro IGP 32MB; Hitachi Travelstar 80GN 80GB 4,200rpm
Dell Inspiron 700m
Windows XP Home; 1.8GHz Intel Pentium M 745; 512MB DDR SDRAM PC2700 333MHz; Intel Extreme Graphics 2 64MB; Fujitsu MHT2060AH 60GB 5,400rpm
Sony VAIO VGN-S470P
Windows XP Pro; 1.73GHz Intel Pentium M 740; 512MB DDR2 SDRAM PC3200 400MHz; Nvidia GeForce Go 6200 128MB; Fujitsu MHT2080BH 80GB 4,200rpm