Sharp MC24 Packs A Punch
Notebook sales and small businesses both are riding a high tide in the channel. For much of the past year, VARs have been more optimistic about near-term spending on notebooks than any other segment, according to CRN’s monthly surveys. Over the past several months, as many as 60 percent of those surveyed expected sales to small businesses to grow at least 6 percent in the near term.
powerful new laptop from Sharp has arrived that solution providers say will save small businesses money in the short and long term.
The Sharp Actius MC24 notebook is a lightweight, streamlined mobile computer that packs the power of a high-performance AMD Athlon XP-M processor 2400+, said Terry Hanly, product marketing manager at Sharp, Mahwah, N.J.
Loaded with 60 Gbytes of drive space, the MC24 also includes 512 Mbytes of DDR-SDRAM memory, a CD-R/RW DVD drive, four USB 2.0 ports, a VGA port, a PCMCIA Type II card slot and 802.11b/g wireless. The unit costs $999.
“With the MC24, we were able to maintain the same level of quality we have in our $2,000 notebooks, so for small-business owners, there is no compromise,” Hanly said.
Over the long term, customers can save money because the MC24 was designed to keep the future needs of customers in mind, said Stephen Tucker, owner of Streamline CPUs, Gainesville, Ga.
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“A lot of my small-business customers are concerned about how long a laptop is going to last—and I don’t mean because of it breaking. I mean storage capacity, OS upgrades, wireless and connectivity staying current. They are looking [for] something they don’t have to upgrade every year, and they are finding it with Sharp,” Tucker said.
Tucker and his team are wrapping up their own test trials of the MC24, which was announced by Sharp in January but only became available to the channel early this month. He said he’s been pleased with the MC24’s performance and will recommend it to customers.