Full Review

The Samsung R510 is based on a 15.4-inch glossy screen that makes movies and images look bright and vivid, and it's bright. This form factor means it is neither compact nor lightweight at over 2.6 kg. Powering the laptop inside is a Core 2 Duo T6400 clocked at 2-GHz, 800MHz FSB and 2MB L2 cache. A healthy 2GB of RAM complements the CPU while the 250GB hard disk gives enough room to store a fair bit of media files.

There are three USB ports (we’d have liked it to sport four) but Firewire is omitted which can be a handicap if you want to import videos from a camcorder. A 1.3MP webcam, SD-only card reader and Gigabit Lan are other features on the R510. On the multimedia front, an HDMI port allows users to hook up the laptop to a large LCD TV to view movies, furthering its stance as a home laptop. The touchpad is nice and big, and the keyboard is good, too. The R510 is built pretty well – the plastic does not buckle easily. The glossy lid can be a fingerprint magnet; if you wipe it clean regularly, the R510 makes for a classy good looking machine.

The glossy lid can be a fingerprint magnet; if you wipe it clean regularly, the R510 makes for a classy good looking machine.

Samsung ships it with Vista Home Basic installed. A WorldBench score of 81 is a clear indicator that performance is no issue with the Samsung R510. It packs enough punch to let you browse the Net with a dozen tabs open while simultaneously running a virus scanner and playing music in the background. The only slight disappointment was its battery life in Mobile Mark 2007, lasting less than 2 hours 30 minutes. But you should get over 3 hours while surfing the Web over Wi-Fi on a conservative battery setting, easily.

Bottom Line

The Samsung NP-R510 is an able performer with a WorldBench score of 81. Is fairly similar in hardware configuration to the Dell Inspiron 15 and our winner, the Acer Aspire 5738. It's a budget laptop with good performance.