Carla Thornton

Premio Kaypro A1100

The Kaypro A1100's big, steady keyboard is comfortable to use, thanks to its oversize palm rest, five programmable buttons, and four-way scroll button. A rarity among modern portables, the A1100 is an all-legacy unit, equipped with every older feature most other notebook lines have long since phased out (but that some businesses still require), including a fixed floppy drive and parallel, PS/2, and serial ports. The A1100 is solidly documented in print and in an Acrobat (Portable Document Format) manual; the latter is notable for its thorough hyperlinking, even in the index.
Some features could be better designed. For instance, the volume thumbwheel, on the far left side, is recessed so far into the case that it's hard to find and turn. The main battery is tricky to remove in that you have to slide two separate releases and pull up on a fingerhold, all at once. Also, the modular optical drive is difficult to line up properly on its rails when you try to reinsert it. On the bright side, you shouldn't need to remove either of these parts often; the optical drive has to come out only when you need to reach the hard drive (which is located beneath it) or when you want to swap in a secondary battery.
The A1100 has a large gray case with silver accents; its optical drive (a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combination model in our test machine) is located conveniently on the front. This rather thick notebook measures 1.9 inches with the lid closed, but its weight is about average at 7.5 pounds (not counting the power adapter). Its sound suffices for listening to tunes in the background while working, but not for enjoying a compelling DVD movie experience. For a notebook equipped with a desktop processor, the A1100 lasted a fair 2.4 hours on one charge of its eight-cell battery. In the performance derby, the 2-GHz Pentium 4-equipped notebook made a good showing against other models powered by a desktop chip. Though we didn't have any 2-GHz desktop-processor models with which to compare it, the A1100's PC WorldBench 4 score of 108 was better than the average mark of 100 that four 2-GHz Pentium 4-M portables earned in our tests.
The A1100 may not be the sleekest notebook on the planet, but it is an appealing desktop replacement due to its performance, typing comfort, and plentiful legacy connections.