Entries by Robin

The Advent netbook laptop is a low cost laptop for light home users and is ideal for word processing, accounting and browsing the Internet. Unlike most budget laptops, it is quite lightweight (1.12kg) making it suitable for carrying form place to place. The 10" Widescreen Display display is great for browsing the web and checking email, although the widescreen feature is a bit of a red herring becuase the laptop might not have quite the processor or memory performance you would like for smooth playback of movies.

The laptops uses the old Windows® XP operating system, but wait - that's not such a bad thing becasue a machine fast and big enough to run the overweight operating system would cost twice as much.

Oh yes, whilst we're on cost, that's what you want to know isn't it?

The Advent 4211 C is currently available from PC World for just £279 - Wow!

Specs
This laptop comes with Intel’s newest and smallest ever processor, the Intel Atom as used in the eeePC. It's good 1GB Memory which isn't going to be great for games but will run the XP Home operating system without any trouble.

Unfortunately, like the eeePC it doesn't come with a CD or DVD drive! Again, this can be a good thing. A more solid laptop for starters, less to go wrong... OK that's the only reason but it's a valid one.

A generous 120GB hard drive provides ample space for storing music, photos and documents. Its also got 3 USB parts too, so you can plug in an external hard drive or DVD drive.

Additional features include a built in webcam, microphone and Bluetooth, so it's a good tool for Skype, NSN and any other program you choose to use to catch up with friends and family online.

Advent 4211 C Netbook now £279.99 from PC World

The HP DV5-1110EM is a perfect Entertainment Laptop with Blu-Ray DVD drive and Radeon HD3450 graphics card it is equally adapt at watching movies or playing games.

The laptop is powered by an AMD Turion X2 processor with 2 processing cores running at a respectable 2.10 Ghz for churning through video like a knife through butter. 3 GB DDR2 memory provides ample space to process and display video or games, although you might want to consider upgrading the OS to something state of the art (like Windows XP... haw haw) rather than using the Vista Home Premium that it is sold with.

Storage is in the form of a 250 GB hard drive, which is above average for a laptop, reflecting its multimedia / home cinema credentials as an entertainment laptop.

You can plug the laptop into your surround sound system to enjoy 3D sound for games, movies and music. 4 USB connections will allow you to plug in your iPod, printer, Skype handset and one more device - so its a sensible balance. If you're interested, it's also got an infra-red port which are rarely used but actually pretty good for syncing a basic Nokia or Sony Ericsson phone.

Many HP laptops have an S-Video output so it's a little dissapointing, but you can connect to many new digital flatscreen TVs with the laptop's HDMI (digital) output.

In most circumstances you'll be more than happy watching your DVDs or the BBC's marvellous iPlayer on the 15.4" High Definition display, but sadly this entertainment laptops lacks a TV output!

Weighing in at 2.65 kg you wouldn't rule this laptop out for business jetsetting, but that's not its purpose in life. For one thing it's also pretty large (259 mm * 357 mm *349 mm) but its high performance graphics and fast processor are also pretty tough on the battery life.

All in all a good little portable media laptop at a good price from a brand you can trust. It's available in Black / Silver from PC World priced £599 inc VAT.

The Acer Aspire 5920 is on sale at PC World UK for just £399.97 at the moment and just it's worth every penny. Shipping with Vista Home Premium, this affordable laptop has just about everything home-office buyers could ask for in a solid budget notebook. With a generous 3Gb DDR2 RAM and an Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 2MB L2 Cache (4mb cache models are available) this little laptop is more than fit to cope with the trials of Vista and still pack a punch.

Acer have continued their car obsession of Ferrari and Lamborghini laptops with this suitably robust and clean design from BMW Designworks.

The Aspire 5250's 250 GB SATA Hard drive allows you to store over 60,000 songs or 200,000 photos, with good read and write performance. When you've filled it up, there's a dual layer DVD drive which can back up up to 8.5 Gb to disc in one shot.

As you would expect from ACER, there's also a handy 5-in-1 card reader, supporting Secure Digital (SD), MultiMediaCard (MMC), Memory Stick® (MS), Memory Stick PRO™ (MS PRO), xD-Picture Card™ (xD) formats.

This is an excellent little package from ACER, perfect for the home or light traveling home office user. Watch the spec, just like any laptop there's alot more than one Aspire 5250 to chose from!

The Extensa 5220 Value series from Acer is a light, compact laptop with "big" laptop performance at mini-laptop prices. It's great for short travel, weighing just 2.9 kg and is alos a good laptop for browsing the internet, checking your email and downloading music.

Features

• Intel® Celeron 540 Processor Technology
  
• 1GB DDR2 RAM / 80GB Hard Disc Drive
  
• DVD+-RW/+-R DL/RAM
  
• Windows XP Professional (great for business users)

The laptop is powered by an Intel® Core™2 Duo 2.10GHz Processor with 1 MB L2 cache, which is good for around £300. It ships with 1GB RAM which is fine for Windows XP, should you wish to upgrade to resource hungry Vista at a later date then it is very affordable to upgrade to its max capacity of 2GB by ordering DDR2 laptop memory from suppliers such as Crucial.

This cheap little Cheap Laptops">laptop has an 80GB SATA-150 hard drive, which can load up large files quickly.

The 5520 has Ethernet (Gigabit Ethernet compatible) networking for use in the office or with a fast home multimedia network. For wireless use it has a wireless card that supports both old (11Mbps) and newer IEEE 802.11g (54 Mbps) networking.

Measuring 15.4", the screen's graphics are provided by an Intel Graphics Media Accelerator (GMA) X3100 which will do a good job with anything less than a full blown 3D shoot 'em up.

An 8X DVD-Super Multi double-layer drive is ideal for up to 8.5 Gb backup of files to DVD. For smaller file transfers between computers and devices such as mp3 players and cameras the laptop also has a multi-card reader that is compatible with SD, Sony Memory Stick and
Memory Stick PRO, MultiMediaCard and xD-Picture Card.

The laptops comes with a 1 year warranty and a trial version of Microsoft Office 2007 that lasts for 60 days. Of course, you can still use the wonderful Office 2003 with XP so there's no need to use it if you don't want to!

The MSI PR600 Plus laptop from MESH offers high computing performance at a relatively cheap price of just £529 (£450 ex vat).



Specification:

• Windows Vista Home Premium (Good for most users, some may wish to consider upgrading for more features / control)
  
• Intel Core 2 Duo T7250 Processor (2.0GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB)
  
• 2GB DDR2 667MHz Memory (Fast memory)
  
• 160GB SATA Hard Drive (Fast hard drive for laptops)
  
• 15.4" Widescreen ACV (stands for "Amazing Crystal Vision")
  
• Bulit in extras including a 1.3 megapixel webcam and multi-memory card reader
  

MESH currently offer this already cheap laptop with a free carry case, USB Mouse and best of all a 2 Year collect and return warranty for UK Mainland customers.

Visit MESH to find out more