Medion MD96480 review

Medion's MD96480 comes with a user manual that contains all the information anyone needs to use their new computer. This is a welcome addition that we wish all manufacturers would include.

The laptop has a sleek, glossy finish that feels stylish and luxurious, although the black lid is easily marked by fingerprints. The glossy, high-quality 15.4in screen has 1,280 x 800 resolution. It flexes when you apply a lot of pressure on it, but otherwise it feels robust, as does the chassis. The screen is fairly evenly lit, being just a shade lighter at the bottom of the screen, but nothing too distracting. Our greyscale test revealed a smooth transition from black to white with very minimal banding.

The MD96480 comes with Windows Vista Home Premium, which includes Windows Media Center. Despite the affordable price, Medion has included a remote control and USB receiver, which means that you can operate Media Center from the comfort of your sofa. Although a remote might seem unnecessary when watching movies on a 15.4in display, it's very useful when you connect a larger screen using the DVI or HDMI outputs. The latter is particularly welcome at this price. There's also an S/PDIF output for connecting to external speakers. The built-in speakers are decent enough, and although the treble gets a little harsh at the highest volume, there's no distortion.

The Nvidia GeForce 8600M GS graphics card achieved only 13.8fps in our Call of Duty 2 test, which isn't fast enough for smooth gameplay. Lowering the resolution to 1,024x768 and turning off anti-aliasing gave us a playable frame rate, but this resulted in lower-quality graphics. The Core 2 Duo T5250 processor isn't the fastest, either. It runs at only 1.50GHz and managed a score of 120 in our Windows benchmarks.

The keyboard is very responsive and gives plenty of feedback. The trackpad is also responsive, although there is a tiny delay between moving your finger across the pad and the cursor moving on the screen. There's no internal modem, which won't be a problem for most people. If you do need one, external modems cost around £20. At two hours and 33 minutes, the MD96480's battery life is average for a 15.4in notebook.

This is a great all-round notebook at an affordable price. The 250GB hard disk is ample for all your photos, documents and MP3s. A faster processor would have been nice, but it's still excellent value.