We found a few faults with the touchpad employed in this notebook model. First, it has only two standard buttons (instead of the mouse’s left and right ones), without a scroll button. Second, these buttons are not quite handy. Although the buttons are rather large, only the part near the center of the touchpad can be pressed. It means you have to spend some time finding touch-sensitive areas on the buttons.

The OpenBook 1559-JL is equipped with a 15” LCD screen with 1400x1050 resolution. The backlight intensity is regulated by means of the functional keys. The screen brightness may also automatically vary depending on the power source (the power grid or the battery). You can control this auto-brightness feature through the BIOS Setup program. Unfortunately, the manufacturer does not equip the OpenBook 1559-JL with any special utilities for controlling the power-saving modes from the OS.

The lid latch and the optical drive are located on the notebook’s front panel. The drive’s Eject button is sunk rather too deep into the case, so it’s not quite handy to use it – sometimes you can’t press it right and the drive’s tray does not move out. The emergency extraction hole and the indicator of the optical drive are located next to the button.

On the notebook’s left panel there are expansion slots and a card-reader. Here, we have a PCMCIA slot and a new Express Card slot compatible with Express Card|54 as well as Express Card|34. The dimensions of the OpenBook didn’t allow accommodating a full-fledged card-reader, so the installed reader supports only Secure Digital, MultiMediaCard, Memory Stick, Memory Stick Pro and XD formats. Besides the slots for flash and expansion cards, there is an analog volume control for the integrated audio subsystem on the left panel. Using this wheel, you can control the volume without opening the notebook’s lid.

A Kensington lock and vent holes of the CPU cooling system can be found on the right panel.

The following things are located on the rear panel of the OpenBook 1559-JL:

• Power connector to power up the notebook and recharge the accumulator
• S-Video output
• D-Sub connector for an external monitor supported by the preinstalled GeForce Go 6600
• Vent holes of the graphics card cooling system
• Integrated modem connector (RJ-11)
• Network connector (RJ-45)
• One FireWire port
• Three USB ports
• Line audio input combined with SPDIF

By the way, thanks to the installed GeForce Go 6600 graphics card, the OpenBook 1559-JL fully supports dual-monitor configurations which may be a serious advantage for a number of applications.

Unfortunately, the functionality of this barebone is not fully satisfactory. The OpenBook 1559-JL does not have an IrDA port and is equipped with only three USB 2.0 ports. Both these things limit the functionality somewhat, possibly causing inconvenience to the user.