The HP Compaq Presario B1900 measures in at 287 x 223.8 x 34mm and weighs a scant 1.75kg, making it an easy laptop to carry for extended periods of time. That kind of weight and size does limit the screen size--it's a 12-inch widescreen 1,280 x 800-pixel panel using HP's BrightView technology to deliver images. The keyboard, while naturally small, has good tactile response, and like most laptops without a full keyboard, marries a large number of additional functions, including a virtual number pad, to the function key.
The trackpad at the base of the B1900 incorporates a virtually standard scrollbar on the side. There's not much space around the sides of the B1900, and none of it is wasted, with three USB ports, a Kensington lock slot and power adapter on the right hand side and S-video out, optical drive, 4-in-1 memory card reader and single ExpressCard slot on the left. The front of the laptop is by comparison a little bare, with only headphone and microphone sockets alongside a flip-down socket for a FireWire connector. The rear of the notebook houses a 10/100 Ethernet port and 56K modem socket.
The B1900's technical specifications are quite impressive given the asking price. For around two grand you get an Intel Core Duo T2250 (1.73Ghz, 2MB L2 Cache, 533MHz FSB), 1GB of RAM over two 512MB DIMMs and an 80GB hard drive. One unusual feature for an ultraportable with travelers in mind comes in the form of the graphics solution. Many ultraportables opt for the cheapest integrated graphics--usually the Intel solution--but the B1900 uses the aging but hardly shabby ATI Radeon Xpress 200M. The one caveat here is that it still uses a shared memory solution, so it'll eat up to 128MB of your memory while running.
On the networking front, the B1900 supports 10/100 wired networking, as well as the entire base of ratified wireless standards--802.11a/b/g as well as Bluetooth, all of which are switched on via the function keyboard. Annoyingly, there's no way to enable just wireless or just Bluetooth; it's all or nothing. The optical drive, which can be removed if you really want to cut down the carrying weight, is a Super Multi DVD burner that supports all currently available DVD formats; at this price you're not going to get Blu-ray or HD-DVD, naturally enough.
Specification Code: HP-Compaq-Presario-B1900-Core Duo T2050
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