PC Club Enpower ENP660: Back to School

Conclusion

The PC Club Enpower ENP660 (MSI MS-1637) turns out to be nearly identical in most ways to the HP dv6500t. The main difference is in the configuration options you find at either vendor. The result really isn't too surprising, but it does allow us to look at other aspects of the systems to determine which might be the better choice.

The first area most people are going to look at is price, and at present HP has a slight advantage. The dv6500t has a $100 instant rebate running right now, and the net result is that it ends up being $125 cheaper (give or take) than the ENP660. HP also offers more customization options, although all the important ones are covered by both companies. With HP being a larger company that has a worldwide presence, you can expect 24/7 technical support. PC Club's call center is open from 9 AM to 5 PM PST, Monday through Friday.

With pricing and support going to HP, what does PC Club really have to offer? For some, local brick-and-mortar stores; for most others, we can really only see one thing that would make us choose the ENP660 over the dv6500t: the keyboard. That might seem silly, but when you consider the amount of typing some people do, that might be enough to sway their decision - especially people who like number keypads. Sure, you can always go buy a cheap keyboard and plug it into your laptop, but that doesn't work very well if you're traveling in a plane, car, bus, etc. At present, that would be a pretty expensive keyboard upgrade, but prices fluctuate over time and if the difference is only $20 or even $50 we could see quite a few people preferring the PC Club notebook.

If you want a good display, you're going to need to look elsewhere - and judging by what we've seen, you might not be able to find a decent laptop LCD without spending at least $1500-$2000 these days. That's the only serious drawback to this particular laptop. We also mentioned earlier that we encountered some system instability during testing that was somewhat interesting, and we wanted to take a minute to cover that now.

We would really love to say that 802.11n wireless networking is the greatest thing ever, but so far the Draft-N equipment is living up to its "draft" name. We remain hopeful that most of the issues will get worked out over time, but as it stands the only crash we experienced while using the ENP660 appears to be networking related. We were testing with a NetGear WNR834M router, and we didn't encounter any notebook problems when running in 11g mode (though the router does still need to be reset a couple times per week). When running in the higher bandwidth 11n mode, not only did we lose network connectivity on occasion (which can most likely be attributed to the router) but we also had Windows Explorer stop responding while accessing a network computer. It didn't just stop responding either: we eventually had to force reboot the system. Besides the crash, network stability in general was not as good when running in 11n mode.

Raw transfer rates are roughly two to three times as fast as 11g when everything works properly (up to 7.6MB/s versus ~3.3MB/s), but if you actually need to transfer large amounts of data you're still far better off with a wired Ethernet connection. The jury is still out on whether or not 802.11n can actually provide consistently fast, reliable wireless access. At present all we can say for sure is that we had difficulties using a NetGear router with the Intel 4965abn adapter. We certainly wouldn't let Draft-N support be a deciding factor in our purchase of a laptop.

The ENP660 does end up meeting its goal of being a reasonable student or home office laptop. Is it substantially better than competing models? Not necessarily, but neither is it substantially worse. It's one of many garden-variety notebooks that you can find for sale these days, and for the less demanding users it will do a good job. And we like the keyboard - more 15" and larger notebooks should follow MSI's example. Perhaps it might even help a few accounting students with their financial homework.