The configuration of the ASUS S200N doesn’t include an optical or floppy drive – it is too small for that. The ASUS S300N, however, does feature an inbuilt DVD/CD-RW drive that can read CDs and DVDs at 24x and 8x speeds, respectively. It rewrites CD-RWs at 16x and burns CD-Rs at 24x.

Both systems boast Wi-Fi units of the IEEE 802.11b standard. Unfortunately, none of them supports the Bluetooth interface or has an infrared unit for connecting to a cell phone or another notebook.

The sub-notebooks both have rather quiet cooling systems (a most important factor of any computer!) I measured the temperatures with an infrared thermometer during the Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 test to get the following results:

• ASUS S200N: 37°C top, 41°C bottom, 43°C at the output of the cooling system;
• Acer S300N: 39°C top, 46°C bottom and 49°C at the output of the cooling system.

The following table details the technical characteristics of the S200N and S300N sub-notebooks from ASUS: