The Benq Joybook A52… Should make you happy

Another cheap notebook. Since I played a lot with the HP EliteBook I fear a bit to start testing a low-price notebook.

With the fear of the headaches caused by a cheap thing, I started the test of the Benq JoyBook A52.

First impressions about the JoyBook A52

Nice, black case, with standard notebook keyboard. Typing on it is a pleasure, the keys of the JoyBook A52’s are very soft.
The anti-glare layer on the WXGA display performs very well, even in very bright environment is easy to watch a movie for example. The picture you get is always high quality, the text is sharp and the brightness of the JoyBook’s display can be adjusted on a wide range, function which can be very useful for travelers.
The touchpad is extremely sensitive, even from half an inch senses the finger, this can be very annoying as while navigating on the internet I encountered situations when the notebook thought I clicked and followed links normally I would not follow. There are only two buttons attached to the Benq JoyBook A52’s touchpad, I got used to the 3rd mouse button, so I felt the need of the missing button many times.

The Benq JoyBook A52’s hardware

The Joybook A52 I tested has an Intel Core Duo T2250 processor, with a FSB working at 533 MHz and with a generous, 2 Megabytes of cache. It has 1 Gigabyte of RAM, so in combination with the processor, the JoyBook A52 can perform very well in the office, in the hands of a web-developer, on the internet in media-rich and Web 2.0 applications or even in the hands of a user which uses its notebook for watching HD movies. As usually, I don’t recommend this notebook for gaming. I tested the Benq JoyBook A52 this time with 2 games: World of Warcraft and The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. The first, World of Warcraft performed very well, the latter, Oblivion, very poor, even if the details of the graphics were set to “Low detail”. The low performance can be the result of the Joybook A52’s video card, which, let’s be realistic, it’s not designed explicitly for gaming. The video card is a ATI Radeon Xpress 200M, the mobile edition of the infamous Radeon Xpress. In the mobile edition the video memory is shared and the maximum you can set to is only 128 MegaBytes. Which is not enough for most of the games.

HD movies and the Benq JoyBook A52

The Joybook A52 passed my HD-movie test with ease. The video I tested with was a HD 720p, read, the lower end of the HD videos. The play was very smooth, always above 24 FPS, this means the human eye recognizes the motion as a real action, it’s flawless.
The VGA port on the JoyBook A52 comes handy when you want to link the notebook to a plasma display, a CRT or LCD monitor. Viewing the movies played on the Benq A52 and viewed on a plasma display can be a very cool experience.

Installing various operating systems on the Benq JoyBook A52

The JoyBook A52 notebook is Vista-ready. This tells a lot, for example the fact that installing other operating systems can be a real headache.
By default, the notebook is shipped with Window Vista Home Basic. Switching to other OS can be done without any greater issue. The first step always is to download all the possible drivers from a Benq website, I found everything I needed on the German Benq website. XP will not recognize everything from the start nor has drivers for every hardware in the JoyBook A52, so if you forgot to download the drivers for XP and you have LAN broadband internet, it can be a headache to get the drivers after install. Be sure to download every driver *before* installing XP.

If you want to install a Linux distro, better forget it. There are NO drivers for *any* Linux.

The autonomy of the JoyBook A52

It’s more than worse. If I left the JoyBook A52 alone, it resisted on batteries 41 minutes. Running a video worsened the situation and almost halved the autonomy of the batteries. Running a game on batteries, is a bad idea anyway, but in a bit more than 10 minutes the batteries were empty.
The difference between Vista’s and XP’s power management is extremely big. While Vista produced the above performance (if we can call that performance), XP lasted on batteries about 20-25% less in the above mentioned situations.
So, the 4 cell Lithium-ion batteries are not enough for the Benq Joybook A52, at all.

Verdict on the Benq Joybook A52

The price of the Benq JoyBook A52 is around $500+VAT where I live. Its price in comparison with its performance I’d say it’s excellent.
Would I recommend it? Definitely yes.

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