14 DAY TRIAL // Some companies are making the transition to Windows 7 faster than others, already deciding to no longer offer certain products with Windows Vista or XP. One of the more recent devices to only be offered with Windows 7 is Maingear's new laptop, a slim, matte-black mobile PC with LED backlighting and ATI Radeon HD 4000-Series graphics. The systems is, essentially, a multimedia notebook with a large memory capacity and no unnecessary third-party software that “bogs down your system.”
Maingear's latest laptop is known as the mX-L 15 and is powered by a choice of Arrandale CPUs, specifically Intel Core i5 or Core i7 central processing units. The processor is paired with up to 8GB of RAM, so that applications may run without stutter and at high refresh rates.
Maingear also decided to leave out DirectX 11 support, as it is mostly aimed at gaming, and went, instead, for the DirectX 10.1-supporting ATI Radeon HD 4570 card with 512MB. This display adapter is perfectly suited for any and all multimedia playback tasks and its crisp images are displayed on a 15.6-inch, LED-backlit screen with a maximum resolution of 1366 x 768 or 1600 x 900.
As far as storage is concerned, the PC maker offers a variety of SSD or HDD options, although solid state drives are recommended for their lack of moving parts and, thus, lack of noise. SSDs are also more responsive and significantly faster. Selectable hard drives can have up to 320GB, whereas SSDs can even go as high as 512GB. As for connectivity and I/O options, the multimedia laptop has Gigabit Ethernet, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, Bluetooth, a 2-megapixel webcam, an Express Card 34/54 slot and an HDMI output.
The laptop runs on a six-cell battery and will start shipping on the 17th of March. Prices will start at $999.