Laptops

[Gin&Tonic]

Ok here we discuss the specs, pros and cons of our laptops.

I'll start off. I have an Acer Aspire 170SMi.
Specs
17" SXGA TFT LCD
Intel Pentium 4 3.06GHz
512MB DDR-SDRAM
120GB 7200rpm Ultra ATA/100 HDD
nVIDIA GeForce FX Go5600, 128mb
IEE 802.11b wireless LAN
DVD-RW Drive
4 x USB
FDD
1 x PCMCIA slot
56k modem (cable included)
Network Card
Video Out Port


Aesthetics
The lappy looks good; with a black and silver casing and silver buttons. The touchpad looks swish, and the DJ panel on the front of the computer are very nice. LEDs are green, apart from the charging battery and standby ones which are orange.
The keyboard is very strudy and excellent to type on. It's full size, with a numpad, and doesn't feel cramped at all.
The screen is very impressive indeed. 17" is a good size for a main computer; which is what I use my laptop as. It's very crisp; and the variable brightness levels are excellent for any surrounding.

Functionality
The computer is obviously a fast little devil. Owing to the fact it has quite a meaty processor, and the fact that the two fans are on the underside of the unit, it does mean the laptop gets rather warm after a few hours of use; and it can thermal (ie, switch itself off) if you don't leave the vents clear. For this reason I would recommend using a lap board if you're using the laptop in bed.
I ordered mine direct from Acer and they preinstalled the extra software I purchased for me, meaning it was ready for use as soon as I opened the box. It comes preinstalled with Win XP with which I've had no problems, but they did of course give me a restore disk I haven't needed to use.

It's always good to back up though; and the DVD writer is exellent for this. Being able to write over 4 gig of data in just over an hour is a job well done to me. Obviously DVD writers will get faster; but you didn't have to sit with the computer; so it wasn't a problem. The drive takes DVD- but can be flashed (which will invalidate the warranty, so I haven't, since there's no need).

I don't have any major niggles; the laptop is a great machine. One slight problem is the weight - im a 21 year old female and found carrying the laptop and it's PSU in the (huge!) case quite hard!. So it's not suitable for constant moving.

The 4 USB ports are very handy; there's 2 on the side and two on the back. The video out port is also a handy feature, but unless you're playing DVDs on a biiiig TV, the 17" screen is more than sufficient.

Sound wise, this laptop is rather excellent in the fact it has a built in sub. The sound can be set to '3D' which gives a good clear sound without distortion as you get on some smaller laptops. Personally I would have liked the sound to go louder; but my neighbours would disagree. Besides I plug my Creative 5.1 in when I want to really do ear damage :D

Battery life could be better; at three hours, but that's due to the size of the screen. It's never been a problem to me, even when sitting on the uni ampitheatre leeching their wireless point for all it's worth in the sun :D (I can't comment on the modem as I've never used it, but networking is easy on this laptop).

Overall
Overall this laptop is a good, solid, hard worker with lots of features. There's very little you won't be able to do on it - I run Maya 5, Flash XP Pro and Photoshop CS without a problem (sometimes simultaneously) whilst watching a DVD in the corner (bless the huge screen).
It is heavy; and it must be noted it isn't a runaround lightweight laptop. If you're wanting 7 hours battery life, this is not for you. But as a main, portable computer, you really can't go wrong. It's pricey, currently at £1,400ish, if you're wanting a good, non main laptop you can pick one up from Currys or PC world for under a grand. But as a working computer, which I use for degree, personal and business needs, I doubt you can do better for the price.

:)

Have a picture:

[Pie R Squared]

I recently ordered the Savrow Katana WSV, and I believe that they are very similar (if not identical) laptops.

The main thing to note with this laptop for all you gamers thinking about it, is that it has a native resolution of 1440 x 900.
This is a widescreen resolution as the screen is so large.

The reason I have bought it up is you will have to default the resolution to 1024 x 768 for the majority of games to run in in their correct aspect ratio, which is a considerable loss of quality due to the way LCD/TFT screen resolutions work.

The wide screen of this laptop is ideal for multimedia work (as mentioned in G & T's review) as you can see two applications at once and have a large field of vision to place things on.

So a recommendation from me to any gamers out there is:

If you want a higer resolution (1280 x 1024 is about the maximum you could get playable with existing laptop GPU's and decent filtering) I'd go for a 15" screen, as they often support 1400 x 1280 as a native resolution, and have no problem scaling to 1280 x 1024

:)

[sidneylopsides]

HP ZV5014EA
£899

2.4GHz P4
512MB DDR
40GB HD
Radeon 9000 (shared RAM up to 128MB)
DVD+RW
5 in 1 card reader
Harmon Kardon speakers
15" semi-wide screen
3 USB
1 Firewire
Tv out
HP dock connector

The laptop does look quite nice, the lid is a silver with a tint of blue, and the inside black, with the silver framing the casing inside. It is not the smallest of machines. All the status lights are blue, which looks ace, and it has a little button to turn the touchpad on and off, with an LED above that to let you know. The keyboard is very nice, there is a large space at the front of the machine to rest your palms on so typing is very comfortable. the front edge of the machine curves off, which looks nice and leaves no corners near your wrists. There are three shortcut keys above the keyboard, these can be customised but they have pictures lit up on them of a camera, video and www.
The screen is excellent, very bright and clear, with very strong colours, great for watching DVDs. The sound is also great for a laptop, quite bassy and loud, with good clarity, the speakers use a labyrinth system to enhance bass, which does work well. The volume control is in between the speakers at the front, with the mute button in the middle, this also glows blue.
The mobo will take up to a 3.2 with HT and this can be does quite easily. The CPU cooling has two fans, one is on all the time, but is very quiet (I have a kameleon remote with luminescent screen that buzzes louder than it) and a second that cuts in when the load increases or it starts to get too hot, this one is faster and noisier, but is not usually on long.
No memory is built into the board, there is one full RAM slot with 512MB in it, this is 333MHz stuff.
The HD is attached to the panel that unscrews from the bootom of the machine, for eas of replacement, the system works very well and connects to the mobo with an edge connector.
The Radeon 9000IGP is integrated into the northbridge, it runs at 300MHZ. It is not brilliant but performs ok, UT2K4 at 1024*768 runs quite well at lowest detail, around 30fps, and Far Cry actually is very playable too, it seems to run better than UT.
The DVD+RW works fine, Roxio comes with the machine.
Performance wise, it runs a bit faster than a 2GHz desktop P4, but not as fast as a 2.4.
One odd thing I noticed about it, in Belarc advisor it detects a Radeon 9000IGP and a 9200Mobility. There is an I dentical model with a 9200, I suppose it is possible the chip is on board, but not allowed by the bios. I hope anyway ;)

Overall, it is a good work machine with the ability for a bit of gaming, even with the newest stuff. The upgradability is pretty good too. It is worth looking for the next model up with the 9200, intergrated wireless lan and full widescreen is you would use those.
Picture is not the exact model, but looks like this:

[mrikasu]

Specs

12" TFT (1024x768)
1GHz G4 Processor
512MB RAM
30GB HDD
ATi Mobility Radeon 9200
DVD/CR-RW Drive
Built in AIrPort Extreme (802.11g)
Built in Bluetooth

£925 (Including extra 256MB RAM from Crucial £32)

Look and Feel

Well of course being an Apple the looks on this machine are spot on. It comes in solid white all over which is nicely complimented by the glowing Apple logo on the back (oh yes). The keyboard is vastly improved from previous models and hits the mark perfectly between flimsliness and having-to-hit-the-keys-with-hammer-ness. Also having the small screen means this is a pretty portable machine that is also relatively light. This couples with sturdiness, as these are designed with school children in mind (many schools in the US give them to all their pupils).

Many pictures available here:

http://www.apple.com/uk/ibook/

Functionality

I know, you saw the specs, you are worried aren't you? Luckily the whole thing is surprisingly nippy (and I do have a 2.2GHz Desktop) which is largely due to the operating system being finely tuned for the processors and thus being highly efficient. I can run all my apps fine and Unreal Tournament 2004 runs above my expectations

The DVD plays well in full screen and seems to take up very few resources. The CD burning is also fast with about 10 minutes for one CD being the norm.

On the side of the case you find a Modem, Ethernet, Firewire, USB 2.0 (x2) and Mini-VGA ports. These are in easy reach and are very solid.

I should also mention the reallife battery life of 6 hours which is pretty impressive.

Conclusion

Basically if you want and efficient, small and stylish laptop then this is the one for you. It comes preinstalled with Apple's lovely OS X and iLife as well as a couple of games to mess about on and really caters for everyone.

Just make sure you buy more RAM ontop of the basic spec.

[nickspoon]

I saw this laptop for £349 inc. VAT & Del. from Dell. Unfortunately I couldn't get it from Dell, so I got it from Midland Computers for £328 instead. Came the next day.

Specs
Processor: 2.2 Ghz
RAM: 256 MB
Display Size: 14"
Sound: Built-in Stereo Speakers
Hard Drive: 30 GB
Media Drive: DVD/CD-RW Combo
Built-in Wireless: No
Modem: Built-In 56k
Built-In Ethernet: Yes
PCMCIA Card Ports: 1
USB slots: 3
Battery: Ni-MH, 1 1/2 hours of life

Style
Stylish black laptop with the Dell logo in a silver circle on the lid.

Ease-of-use
Came with Windows XP Home pre-installed. I just plugged it in, switched it on and it came up with a step-by-step configuration. It had a nice 90-day trial of McAfee Security Center. Didn't come with very comprehensive instructions.

Overall
It's a nice entry-level laptop, and for £328 it had real value for money. Not really for people who want to use memory-intensive programs, but if you want a laptop that does that, you should be prepared to shell out another few hundred quid. Comes with lots of things pre-installed and a DVD/CD-RW combo. It is a bit heavy, but I'm currently using it as a desktop replacement, so it's very good. Not very long battery life, but it's good for me due to what I'm using it for. I recommend it!

[Oooh Yeah]

iBook G4

specs

- iBook G4 12" TFT screen.
- IBM powerPC G4 1ghz processor
- 256mb ram
- 60gb hard drive
- slot loading CD-RW/DVD drive
- 8 hours (max i've got out of it) battery life
- firewire, usb 2.0, ethernet, 56k modem, digital video out.
- wireless 802.11.g

review

awesome laptop. built like a brick... made from this stylish bullet proof white plastic ultra strong and sticker friendly.. the little apple on the back lights up, only a 12" screen but this makes it portable, the laptops really light and totally designed to travel with this ultra light strong body, which is on the whole smaller than most laptops it performs well.

if you want an uber graphics machine go for a powerbook, or a different desktop replacement laptop iBook is not your machine.

it's my digital swiss army knife.. i store my music, do photoshop, occasionally play games, my studies.. i surf, chat, e-mail.. organise myself basically.. and it's wicked.

the one thing that has let me down honestly about being on a mac is that webcam functionality is not great. if you are on AIM, Yahoo! or skype you're sorted. but if you use MSN (likely, like me) there is no webcam or audio support, which is a great shame. aparently we're gonna be waiting a year for that despite 20,000 petition signatures.

the main factor for you folks would be cost.. these come in at about £700, and upgrades can tag you up to £900 or so, as you can chuck in an extra gig of ram, and bluetooth.

the best feature of owning an iBook is the OS X, it's awesome. no problems.. easy to use, don't be scared to be different.

hope the review helps.. any questions on mac junk are welcome.. i can add it in here.

besides that more information can be found here

iBook (http://www.apple.com/ibook)

Mac OS X (http://www.apple.com/macosx)

[Smeghead]

specs
not important

functionality
none

good things
none

bad things
MANY!! by the way, my laptop doesn't work.

[Computer God]

Toshiba Satellite A70-RW1
Mobile Intel Pentium 4 +HT @3.06GHz/533FSB
512MB DDR400 Ram
ATI Mobility Radeon 9000
80GB HDD
DVD Super-Multi Drive (reads+writes any format)
Integrated Atheros Total A/B/G Wifi
Windows XP Home SP2
Mac OSX
Ubuntu 5.10

Aftermarket upgrades:

Total Audio+Video In/Out package plus total conversion. $80
Mystify Color-Changing paint job. $30
Performance doubled via software tweaks and 3rd party drivers $0


This laptop is still holding the cake to many many others despite the fact that it is nearly a year old. I paid $1500 Brand New. It is very durable, ultra reliable, and extremely powerful. The screen is a very brilliant, and is best in its class for color and brightness. It is 1280x800 native and is just astonishing.

The only flaw I noticed is its ability to collect dust and overheat, thus requiring a full inner cleaning every six months.

[Paradigm^]

Megar bumpity! Because the reviews section was great and is horiffically underused (tip: at the bottom of the thread index for this section, set it to From: Beginning to see all the posts. IMO this should be on by default).

I have had me an Asus Eee PC for a good few months now, and I'd like to brag about it. So here's a review.

Hardware
Screen: 7" (diagonal) TFT, 800x480 resolution
CPU: Intel x86 Mobile CPU & chipset, running at 900MHz
RAM: 256-1GB DDR2, depending on configuration during purchase
HD: 2-4GB SSD, depending on config
Video card: Don't be such a fool
Network Connectivity: 10/100Mbps Ethernet, 802.11b/g WiFi.
3xUSB 2.0, MMC/SD card reader
VGA out
0.3Megapixel webcam, built in stereo speakers
Slipcase

Price: £200-250, depending on config.

The Eee PC is a very small laptop. It currently comes in white or black, but a range of other colours (including pink and lime green) are on the way. Dimensions are 22.5 x 16.4 x 2.15-3.5 cm (it's slimmer at the front than at the back). For those who hate numbers, here is a visual aid:
http://www.randomprocess.ca/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/eee/eee_xps_open_th.jpg
The other laptop is a Dell XPS M1330, which is on the small end of "standard laptop" (about the size of one of the 12" MacBooks). The upside to this is that it weighs less than 1kg, which makes it amazingly portable; the downside is that the keyboard is tiny. Everyone's first impression of it is "OH MY GOD THE KEYS ARE SO SMALL", but after a little adjustment I don't have any problems with it - you just have to learn to type with your fingertips. However, if your fingers are made of huge slabs of meat and you're not capable of precise hand-eye coordination, then get a different laptop. For everyone else it should be fine, with a little getting used to. The touchpad is also small, but works well. The mouse buttons are a silver bar along the bottom of the pad. They click very noisily and require a fair bit of force to press. The touchpad supports the tap-to-click thing: single tap = single click; double tap = double click; tap with two fingers = middle click. No tap code for right-click, but there's a button for that on the keyboard in the usual place as well as the shiny silver monstrosity.

Sound is generally fine through earphones and (unsurprisingly) tinny through the integrated speakers. These lie either side of the screen, and most people I've met have said they should have shifted them to the touchpad area to get more screen in. This would be a good idea, given the screen is bordered by a slightly ugly black bezel which only serves to point out how much of the top of the laptop isn't screen.

Battery time in my experience is a little under 3hrs. You'd have hoped it would be more, but with small laptop comes small battery. I believe there are 6-cell versions of the battery on the way (if not out already), which would double your time. The charger cable is a minor miracle - it's a little bigger than a phone charger, and no transforming brick in the middle. Hurrah for no brick!

The Eee is quite quiet. There's one CPU fan and that's it, and it's certainly not of the jet engine variety when it kicks off. At full blast it's drowned out by the sound of your typing. The machine doesn't get hugely hot, although if you're of the inclination to have it sitting on a pillow you're a damn fool as all the vents are on the bottom.

Important consideration: there is no optical drive. If you were thinking of watching a DVD on the Eee, forget about it. There isn't room. What you can do is rip it (either to an ISO or to the video format of your choice) and shove it on a USB stick. Obviously this requires a bit more preparation, and a separate computer.

Also on the subject of drives - the hard drive is SSD, so it's fast and quiet. The preinstalled Linux distribution has wear-levelling built in, so it'll prolong the life of your drive more than an install of another distro or OS (people have had plenty of success getting XP and Ubuntu on the machine, and there's work on custom Eee distros, but no wear levelling = hard drive death). Put simply: the hard drive inside the Eee isn't like the ones inside normal computers. It uses similar technology to the stuff in RAM. Upside: it's very fast - much faster than a normal hard drive. Downside: you can only write to each part of the drive a certain number of times before that area buggers up and becomes unusable. The number is of course very big, and the default operating system installed does some trickery so that it'll write to different parts of the drive, rather than hammering a particular area to death. If you're considering installing a different OS on the Eee, it probably won't have wear levelling, so think hard; for everyone else, the Eee will probably last about 25yrs before dying completely (http://wiki.eeeuser.com/ssd_write_limit). So don't sweat.

Software

The Eee PC comes with Xandros Linux preinstalled. By default, it boots up (within 30 seconds) to a custom interface called Easy Mode. I'm not going to bother describing it when there's a lovely web demo of it here (http://www.honeypothack.com/eee/). Suffice it to say that it's incredibly kiddy and somewhat restrictive to the vaguely computer-savvy user. But it's good for your mum, or your Nan, or anyone else who doesn't really 'get' computers. The rest of us will want to switch it over to the Advanced Mode (howto (http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:getkde)), which is a full-blown version of KDE. IMO you can get much more done with this, and it's a lot closer to Windows for those who are already comfortable with it.

The Eee comes bundled with the usual stuff that turns up in a Linux distro: OpenOffice, Firefox, GAIM (now called Pidgin), Adobe Reader. There's also various music and media players. One nice feature of the Eee is the "oh shit I screwed it up" button. There's a hidden partition on the drive which holds the OS and all preinstalled apps. If you tinker with the install too much and find yourself stuck in endless boot loops, or otherwise screw it up, you just press a button on startup and it'll restore itself to factory defaults within a minute. The downside of this is that you can't delete any of the preinstalled programs - the partition is read-only. This is somewhat irritating given the small hard drive and there are some insanely stupid choices of software installed (I'm looking at you, Taiwanese version of Adobe Reader. Give me those 200MB of HD back!).

How does the screen size affect things? In truth, you have to change your usage habits a little. It helps to install a small Firefox theme like Whitehart (http://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/364), and the Fullerscreen (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4650) extension for extra space. There are various other tricks (http://wiki.eeeuser.com/howto:maximize_screen_space) you can use to maximise space too, but in truth you should only really expect to be working on one thing at a time. While the processor will be able to handle OpenOffice, Firefox and Pidgin/Skype running at once, there's no way you're going to get them all on the screen at the same time. Where possible, you'll want to run most of your apps in fullscreen mode, or at least maximised.

Other things: Skype works - with a bit of tinkering you can even get the ideo call feature up and running too. I found this quite impressive, considering Linux's support for webcams suck most of the time. If you're interested in installing other bits and bobs on the Eee, prepare for a bit of a fight: Xandros is a badly supported distro and the repositories just aren't there. You can use Debian repos, but you run the risk of fscking things up if you stumble into one of the areas where Xandros forked from Debian and actually started making changes. This has been a bit of a headache for me, but you can probably get away with avoiding it unless you want to do something odd or fancy with your Eee.

Conclusion

If you're looking for a desktop replacement, the Eee is not your friend. It's not powerful enough to be your main machine. However, if you already have a desktop, or a behemoth of a laptop which you'd rather not have to carry around with you, the Eee is great. It's small, it's light, and by gum it's cheap. My Eee goes with me to Uni every day. It accompanies me on plane trips to foreign countries, giving me the opportunity to watch a film on the way. When I'm there, I still have a machine I can check emails on. I even wrote a project report on it over Christmas. It's one of the best purchases I have ever made. If you're looking for a portable second machine, I would recommend an Eee without hesitation. It does all you reasonably need to do.

The other target market for the Eee is your mum. (Couldn't resist, sorry.) For someone who's never used a computer before and simply wants to browse the internet and do a bit of word processing, the Eee is great. It's cheap (yes I know I keep saying it), and the Easy Mode interface is...well, easy. You'd be hard pushed to find someone who couldn't get their head round it: it does a brilliant job of hiding Linux's terrible complexities (look ma, no terminal!) and presenting a shiny, attractive set of big buttons for people to push to get what they want. Chances are, if you get this for your Nan and spend half an hour going through it with her, you'll find her posting on these forums before you get any tech support requests!

Summary of the conclusion: Laptops this small generally have hefty price tags. Not so the Eee, and it does all you could reasonably ask it to do. It will be your best friend, and you can take it anywhere. Go and buy one. Now.

[Darkeye]

I am reviewing the MEDION MD-96420

This is a amazingly good value for money laptop being only $1500 (£700).
It has 3gig of ram, Nividia Geforce 8600m GS 512mb graphics card, 1.66ghz dual core processor ( 3.20ghz total) Built in Tv tuner , satelite , bluetooth, Vista standard, built in webcam, 4 usb, dvd-rw , 5-1 sound card , built in subwoofer, 3 hour battery life, 250gig hardrive, S/PDIF port, 300mbps wireless card, pci slot , hd output and a num keypad.

It is a whisper quiet machine, Has very power full speakers, a crystal clear 17" pvc lcd screen. The wireless card is very sensitive as it can pick up a signal >500 meters away and hold a good connection.
Its a sexy looking thing weighing <2kg with beatiful black "piano" finish and is german.

[esquilax]

OK, I shall do my new one.

It's the Compaq A910, costing me £479 (now £449, I believe).
Specs
Intel Core 2 Duo T2330 @ 1.6GHz
2GB RAM
160GB Hard drive
Vista Home Premium
3x USB, Card reader, built-in Webcam and microphone
Wireless, DVD-RW..and more stuff.

The Good
Runs brilliantly (OK, so do most computers until you bog them down with stuff)
Separate number pad is very useful, as I write a lot in French
Decent enough speakers
Webcam is pretty good quality
There's a button to deactivate the touchpad when you're typing...stops you accidentally hitting it
It's Shiny

The Bad
Touchpad driver is prone to crashing a lot
Still getting used to the slightly different key layout
Pretty heavy to carry around

OK, so in conlcusion: Solid laptop, good spec for the price, but not without its annoyances. Still worth a look if you're on the lookout for a new laptop for working & internet.

[CoX]

Didn't see this thread. I'll do mine now I've had it for a while.

Dell Inspiron 1720
Cost me £650 when bought, reduced from around £850 thanks to January sales and an online 10% discount voucher. Now costs around £700 new.

http://www.laptoppicker.com/archives/dell-inspiron-1720-laptop.jpg

http://www.laptoppicker.com/archives/dell-inspiron-1720-laptop-front.jpg

http://www.laptoppicker.com/archives/dell-inspiron-1720-laptop-side.jpg

Intel Core 2 Duo Processor T7250 @ 2.0GHz
2GB RAM
160GB HDD
nVidia GeForce 8600 M GT 256MB
DVD+/- RW
Wireless Internet
Bluetooth
Built-in Webcam and Microphone array
Plenty of ports - 5 x USB, 1394, SD/MMC/MSPro slot, VGA, but no DVI out
Standard 6-Cell battery
Windows Vista Home Premium

I got mine with the standard 1440x900 screen, but you can spend another £100 to get an anti-glare 1920x1200 screen. Its a 17" laptop, and I got mine in Ruby Red, which is just gorgeous!

You can also get it in black, blue, yellow, brown, green, pink or white. As with most Dells the specs can be adjusted to your liking but for a price. Other upgrades available on this model include a Blu-Ray drive, that WUXGA hi-res screen I mentioned before (which would only really be worth getting if you got the Blu-Ray drive as well), as well as your usual processor, RAM and hard drive upgrades. The graphics card I got with this one is the highest you can get on this model.

Pros

Exterior looks are very nice - you can choose the colour of the outer lid, and mine is a nice matte red, which looks and feels very nice (it has an almost rubbery texture to it), and it avoids fingerprints too; the black at the bottom is nice and gets the job done
Inside the keyboard and screen are surrounded by grey/silver plastic, which makes a change to boring black, and is also very nice and avoids fingerprints
The screen is lovely, bright and big
Graphics card is excellent, it can run most new games i've thrown at it very well, including Call Of Duty 4 on 1440x900
Full-sized keyboard with num pad is very nice and easy to use, best keyboard i've found on a laptop
Media controls on the front are very useful, although Dell's software management system for changing the volume doesn't, for example, always work during the opening sequences of games or whilst they are loading
Runs very smoothly and quickly


Cons

My god, this thing is big and heavy. If you're looking for a laptop you want to take places with you, go for a 15.4". This is just far too heavy to be carrying around with you all day, especially if you have other things in the bag with it like the plug or mouse. Its more of a desktop replacement.
Heats up very quickly under high performance use, such as gaming. I rest it on my knees which lets the fan on the bottom blow air out, but if you let it rest on a bed or other soft surface, it will heat up and heat up fast.
The DELL metallic logo under the screen also heats up very fast under high performance, and there is no way to cool it down.
The standard 6 cell battery life is woeful under high performance. I took this on a plane and only managed to get about an hour's playtime out of Portal before it got to a critical level.
It says 160GB hard drive, but you'll only be able to use about 140GB. 10GB is dedicated to a Recovery partition, which can be shrunk but not extended back onto the main partition. The other 10GB is missing in action - I think 4GB is used by Vista, and the rest by Dell's MediaDirect service - speaking of which...
Dell MediaDirect, which is supposed to let you play music and photos without having to start up your whole laptop, is very slow and clunky, and often takes just as long as starting up the whole laptop in the first place
Not quite as good as I had hoped to have run on some games, although this may be due to my custom spec - see summary for details...


Summary

Overall, this is a fanastic laptop, that both looks and runs very very well. However, if you're looking to run the latest games well, I would recommend going above what I've chosen. If I could go back and buy this again (with another £100 or so to spend), I'd up to a 2.4GHz processor, and 3GB of RAM. If you still had money to spare after that, you could buy the better battery, but the 9-cell battery does stick out of the back a bit, which is why I avoided it.

However, this laptop has served me very well thus far. With a bit of software-based overclocking on the graphics card, I'm running Half Life 2 on maximum settings at a solid 30fps, with only minor dips. Its not futureproof, however, and I think I'll have to upgrade in four or five years. For now, however, this is serving me very well, and I'd throroughly reccomend it as a desktop replacement that will last you many years providing you up the spec a bit.