Esys Wizard

Though it is not universally acknowledged, one of the driving factors in laptops today is products from small, locally-run manufacturers and resellers. These products are basic, often bare-bones, and offer little by way of sophisticated design or attention-grabbing performance. However, they do fill a crucial niche (the budget to value market) and thus tend to be a ready choice for a first-time buyer who wants mobility but is on a tight budget.

While such units are fairly common in countries like China and the US, they are virtually nonexistent in India. But that seems to be changing. Recently, quite a few large resellers have been expressing an interest in entering this market. One such firm is Esys, a Delhi-based distributor that’s introduced its Wizard notebook.

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Keeping in mind its budget positioning, we were not expecting the laptop to be anything spectacular. In this respect we were proven right, as the wizard is a standard 12.1 inch laptop and comes in just one color: black. The lid, the keyboard area, LCD panel cover are all a basic black with no particular visual appeal.

The only color variation (if one can call it that) is that the laptop hinges and the mouse touchpad / buttons are a dull silver. The shape and size are unremarkable; the laptop has a standard widescreen design and is not boxy or weirdly designed. The hinges are sturdy and there’s no extra snap or flex.

The construction, however, is quite good. The plastic used is strong and somewhat heavy, and this gives it a reassuring feel of sturdiness. Despite this, the laptop does manage to remain lightweight. The keyboard is fairly good: it offers excellent tactile feedback with careful positioning and spacing between keys. The keys themselves sport a sober matte finish.

The LCD panel was a surprise. It offered very good levels of brightness, color and contrast. This is the kind of display one would expect in a top-level offering from like Dell/HP/Asus and not in a budget product such as this.

Connectivity-wise, the Wizard is quite okay. It offers three USB 2.0 slots, a multi-format card reader, a VGA port, and the standard Ethernet / Tele jacks. For further specifications, please see this link.

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The whole process of reviewing this laptop become a bit of an issue. In order to save cost, Esys has built the Wizard on an ancient Pentium M chipset which was introduced over five years ago. The actual specifications of the laptop are P4 1.7 M processor, 512 MB RAM, 40 GB HDD space and a DVD combo drive. All this may have been state-of-the-art three or four years ago, but seem a bit of a joke today.

The ancient hardware totally ruled out any hope of testing the machine with Windows Vista . Not that it can’t be done, just the sight of installing Windows Vista on this machine would be like watching paint dry. This is precisely what happened to us. A single install attempt of Windows Vista took nearly 5 hours and in that time just managed to reach 63 percent. We aborted the install.

Our next option was Windows XP, and this went a lot smoother. The install took just over an hour and a half, and went through without too much hassle. However, within the OS, our experience was altogether different: everything was slow, and any standard operation – such as copying a file or opening an Explorer window – took minutes rather than seconds.

Considering the rather laggy performance of the laptop with two current/mainstream operating systems, we decided to bypass our normal PCMark/3DMark testing. Yes, we could have used older variations of these programs, but any test result obtained from these programs would have no meaning today.

While Windows may have been a no-show, Linux proved different. We installed Ubuntu and to our surprise the system was a lot snappier. The install didn’t take long and there was not much configuration required. We were able to perform standard tasks such as movie viewing, surfing the Net, and using OpenOffice to type up this review without any lag or extra fuss. Linux infused new life into what was otherwise a dull laptop.

It was on Linux that we tested the battery life of the Wizard. The tests were done in standard format i.e. listening to music, surfing the Net via Wi-Fi, and standard office document usage. We got around 1 hour and 45 minutes. This is not great battery life but looking at the laptop again… I’d say it’s quite acceptable.

The wizard is priced at Rs 27,500. This is a rather high price to be asking for a laptop that offers some very old specifications. While the 12.1 inch size and excellent screen make up for it somewhat, when you compare it to other offerings it at its price range it fails to entice. Keeping in mind that products like the Acer 4520 cost only Rs 2,500 more, we can’t recommend it at all.