Philips X57

Junk piece of IT. Promises a lot on paper, but fails to deliver. Graphic card heats up and motherboard faults interrupts whatever you are doing. This was replaced 9 months still within guarantee but then occurred again after it expired. Marketed, branded and sold by Dixons/Pc World group so only makes everything even worse.

It over 20 years of PC ownership this has to be the worse piece of IT equipment I have ever owned.

The 15" Philips X57 Freevents laptop is very much a 'run-of-the-mill' affair. It's a smart looking laptop and runs reasonably well. It comes with a CPU Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 (1.66GHz), 1GB ram (I upgraded to 2GB)and an 100GB harddrive. It also has an NVidia GForce Go 7400 graphics chip included on the laptop motherboard. This is NOT a dedicated graphics card. Although certain PC games will play fine, if you are looking to play more 'high-end' games, then look elsewhere.

Having had this laptop for just under 2 years, it has served me ok (up until the screen packed up..more to follow)and has done exactly what I wanted. Upgrading the memory on it was easy and this did improve the overall speed of the system but only marginally. The screen resolution is a standard 1024 X 768 and looks ok.

The real disappointment with this laptop is the fact that the screen decided to corrupt and , having looked through numerous internet posts, it appears to be a known issue. I have tried to reinstall the OS and reset to factory settings but without luck. There are no dedicated software drivers for the NVidia graphics chip either. By connecting it to a monitor via it's DVI port (a plus point) I am still able to use it but this really shouldn't have to be the case. Battery life is not great either. on average I could get just under 2 hours out of it. The battery performance can be changed but really doesn't seem to make much difference in terms of time usage. I wish I could say more positives about this laptop but unfortunately I can't. It may be that the newer versions of this laptop have rectified the issues I have covered BUT, as with any computer, a little bit of research first will help you to make an informed decision. It's just a very mediocre affair, hence the mediocre score.

I bought mine new over 2 years ago.It's been nothing but trouble,key, screen, power problems and the wifi went down for no reason.It had vista premium installed.Everything I tried to add and run on it turned into a major trauma,camera's (took 1.5hours to load 36 pictures),printers,internet and security programmes clashed with it.A fancy looking piece of kit.But in my opinion,dont touch philips.I now have a Dell XP and it's brilliant.Have installed everything on it in an hour using its own wizard,so save yourself a lot of trouble and late nights.DONT GET ONE.THEY JUST LOOK NICE!!!