Advent 7201 Review

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3.7 stars
Average rating for this product is: 3.7 out of 5

From 4 ratings and 12 reviews

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lewic's Review of Advent 7201 Laptop

25th Jul 2007

Overall Rating

1 stars
  • Value for money
    1.5 stars
  • Screen Quality
    2 stars
  • Ease of Use
    1 stars
  • Time Laptop Owned
    Between 1 - 4 Weeks
  • Battery Life
    2 stars
Good Points

Wide screen. It isn't massively heavy.


Bad Points

Runs like a dog with Windows Vista installed. Whoever thought of putting this operating system on such a low-spec machine obviously hasn't tried using it. As for the person who sold this piece of crap to my hapless elderly parents (who admittedly didn't listen when I said "DON'T GET VISTA")...

It came with lots of useless software which (together with the bloated OS) uses up nearly half the 80 GB hard drive, and finding how to stop it all trying to load up at start-up is a right pain, due to Vista Home hiding all the useful settings.

It brought up "out of virtual memory" errors when I loaded Photoshop Elements, and I had to turn off all the fancy stuff in order to allow it to run. So now they have a horrible-looking user-unfriendly interface instead of an attractive user-unfriendly interface. It is a similar speed to the ancient P400 Windows 98 laptops that were recently binned at work, taking ages to load and momentarily freezing whenever you save an image. God knows what it would be like with the full version of Photoshop, or trying to run slideshows in Powerpoint (which is what my parents wanted to do with it). The keyboard is horrid and plastic, and the touchpad gets in the way. It came with no recovery CD, and there appears to be no paper instructions explaining the need to create one.


General Comments

The Advent 7201 may be fine if Windows XP could be installed on it. My nephew is threatening to do this, but I do not know if the hardware is compatible. Has anyone tried it?

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Members' Comments onlewic's Review

  • happydan Rank: Major on 3rd Aug 2007

    Check their website to see if they have drivers for XP. I would find it hard to believe that they did anything other than pre-load Vista on to an existing model. Also, if you find the right support person, they should be quite helpful in getting that foul thing off the machine. I bought a Dell BECAUSE they still sell XP...

  • occupier on 15th Feb 2008

    Type tuneup utilities 2008 in google and download it (trial version) allows you to stop all them annoying start up programs believe me makes a big improvement on speed. If you want to install xp the hardware will be comp but you have to get a raid driver to access the drive