Advent K300 review

Advent's K300 is aimed at a young audience; there's a variety of lid designs to choose from for boys and girls, including football designs for aspiring young Wayne Rooneys and skull motifs for non-football fans.

It has a 120GB hard disk, which will hold all the photos, documents and MP3s a child could possibly want to collect, plus 2GB of RAM, which makes the K300 work swiftly in Windows Vista Home Premium. It also comes with Microsoft Encarta Standard 2007 preinstalled, which is a decent software encyclopedia that will help with your children's learning.

The K300's chassis is robust, as is the 15.4in, 1,280x800 glossy widescreen, which barely flexes under pressure. The display is evenly lit, with colours appearing solidly across the display. We saw some minimal banding in our greyscale test, but it's no cause for concern. The keyboard is responsive and the keys are quite quiet when typing.

The built-in speakers sound tinny and produce little bass. This is a poor showing even compared with other notebooks. Unlike some notebook speakers, however, they can be loud without distorting. There's an S/PDIF output, which you can use to connect to external speaker systems. There are also three USB2 ports and a single FireWire port for connecting peripherals. Bluetooth and WiFi come as standard.

The K300 did particularly well in our video-encoding and multitasking benchmarks for a budget notebook. Otherwise, the results were little above average. The battery life is particularly poor, lasting only one hour and 40 minutes, and it takes around the same time to charge fully. The onboard ATI Radeon X2300 HD graphics processor managed 9.2fps in our Call of Duty 2 test, so while it's not suitable for playing modern 3D games it should be fine for older games. If you want to connect an external display, there are D-sub and S-video outputs. It's a shame there's no DVI or HDMI output, as plenty of similarly priced notebooks, such as Medion's MD96480, have them.

The K300 is a reasonable notebook, but it's a little overpriced. It's comfortable to use and is powerful enough, but you should expect to pay around £100 less for a notebook with this specification. There are also plenty of notebooks in this price range with far longer battery lives. If battery life is a concern, we'd recommend PC Nextday's Zoostorm 52-4201. It has a 160GB hard disk and two-and-a-half hours of battery life, which is reasonable for a 15.4in notebook and far longer than the K300.