It’s a neatly designed 15.6-inch laptop, with a glossy black case and silver trim. Build quality is reassuring so we wouldn’t have any worries about carrying it around in a backpack, but it does weigh 2.4Kg and measures a rather chunky 36mm when closed. See also: Group test: what's the best budget laptop?
Battery life is relatively modest, giving just over 3.5 hours of streaming video, although with Wi-Fi disabled, you should still be able to get some decent work done when you’re away from the mains.
The 1366x768 display is bright and sharp, and is good for watching video or browsing your photo collection. The glossy coating - as we always say - can be annoying when you see your own face staring back at you.
The speakers are also rather feeble even by laptop standards, producing little volume and poor bass. The touchpad’s a little small, but the keyboard is large and comfortable to use – although the space bar does rattle a bit when typing quickly.
This model is one of the cheapest in the EasyNote TE range yet it has a healthy 8GB of memory, and a 750GB hard disk that will provide plenty of room for storing music, photos and video.
The weak link in the chain is the dual-core 1.7GHz Celeron processor. This produced modest score of 1852 when running PCMark 7. That's plenty of power to edit documents and browse the web, but more demanding work tasks will likely take a lot longer than laptops equipped with Core i3 or i5 chips.
The Celeron lacks the Intel HD 4000 graphics used by current Ivy Bridge processors. Even at 1280x720 with low graphics settings, Stalker ran at around 15fps, which is to say jerky and unplayable.
We don’t want to be too harsh on the EasyNote TE, as it’s a perfectly functional laptop for basic computing work. However, compared to the Lenovo G580 which costs only a little more, the TE11HC isn't great value.
The EasyNote lacks the Lenovo's USB 3.0 ports, Bluetooth radio and its faster processor and graphics chip. The Packard Bell might have 2GB more RAM than the G580, but it's an unnecessary expense and doesn't boost performance.
