VERDICT:The CD18 is a 12.1-inch screen which makes it a fairly compact laptop in that aspect. It still has a bad design and feel, and seems a little costlier than what it should have been.
Cheap But Lacking Power
Those who don’t own a desktop today opt for a basic notebook that they can carry around instead. Performance isn’t the necessity for most of them, but features are and this market has been growing steadily. The Chirag CD 18 is a laptop targeted towards this kind of consumer market.
The CD 18 comes with a 12.1-inch screen that has a resolution of 1280×800. The screen quality is average but viewing angles are pretty poor. Being an entry level laptop, there isn’t a lot of firepower but a 1.86-GHz Core Duo T2350 processor is much more than enough for tasks.
The graphics are powered by the onboard ATI Xpress 200 solution.
The design is compact but the laptop is very thick. The right top region of the laptop gets warm pretty quickly. The keys feel cheap and so does the body material itself. It feels like a rather old outdated system.
The performance is as expected. Far Cry at 640 x 480 with low quality gave average frame rates of around 26 fps. 3D Mark 2005 results matched some of the other laptops of its class, because of the respectable graphics solution on the laptop.
There are few missing things—there is no inbuilt Bluetooth, nor is there a webcam. To make up for that, there is an external Bluetooth dongle provided and a USB drive as well. All the other regular features are present.
An additional 512 MB of RAM would give it some more performance to compare well with the other laptops of its class, and it would have enabled users to be able to run Vista on it as well.
