Labs

The Amilo Si 1520 is not as fast as the other notebooks in this group, but at only £775 including VAT it's far cheaper than the competition.

FEATURES

The Amilo's chassis feels robust, but it looks unexciting and businesslike. The 80GB hard disk provides plenty of room for music and media files as well as work, and the two-layer DVD writer allows you to create backups. Windows XP Home Edition is installed rather than Windows XP Professional Edition.

The chassis has a good range of ports, including four USB connectors and a DVI

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output for a digital connection to an external monitor or projector. The keyboard has a decent layout, with no small keys. However, it has a shallow action - the keys don't move far when pushed. It isn't an ideal keyboard for those who need to type for long periods. The touch pad is accurate, but its buttons are small and feel indistinct when pressed.

We found no problems in our standard display tests. It can't produce a very bright white, but our white screen test looked clear and was consistent across the screen. Colours were a little soft, but blended together well.

PERFORMANCE

This was the slowest notebook in the group, with an overall score of 104 in our application benchmarks. This is because its processor, the 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo 2300, is one of the slowest in the group and it has only 512MB of RAM. Still, it is only marginally slower than notebooks that cost hundreds of pounds more.

It ran for three hours and 15 minutes in our battery test. This is the lowest score other than the Acer when using its smaller portable battery, but it's still above the three-hour minimum we recommend for mobile use.