Advent 9617 Recon

A very good laptop, powerful enough for everyday use and can play games to a decent degree. Battery life isn't as good as others, but it does have a 17" screen and a 1.6 GHz processor, neither of which are that easy on the juice.

The laptop does weigh quite a lot, and isn't the thinnest. It also tends to get fairly hot, averaging at ~50oC, but is still comfortable with working its socks off, ~80-95% CPU usage gives a max of 68oC.

Vista uses a lot of its memory, but changing to XP or a Linux system (free!) relieves this problem, boosting the memory availiable for other programmes, and also graphics, which is integrated.

The touchpad can get annoying when typing and there is no way to turn it off, unless you're running Ubuntu.

It is easy to run two screens, just plug it in and the graphics card recognises it straight away, allowing you to mirror the screen, or etend the desktop.

As with all laptop speakers, these are fairly rubbish, but serve their purpose well enough.

If you sould want to upgrade, the memory modules are easy enough to get to, as is the harddrive.

All in all, the Advent 9617 is a great mid-range laptop, it performs well, but is let down by its weight, physical size and average battery life.

Very easy to use and has windows vista already installed so you don't have to download a software your self. Comes with Microsoft word and everything. I enjoyed using it a lot because it is really handy and you can carry it around really easily because you can use it without the wire, so best laptop I got so far. I would recommend it to anyone who want a reasonable price laptop.

Generally good laptop, great price and ideal for anyone who needs to use it at home for there school work and stuff.