Asus F7Sr review

The F7Sr's charcoal colour scheme makes it look businesslike without being stuffy.

The back and right-hand edges have every sort of socket we could hope for, with five USB2, FireWire, HDMI, D-sub, S-video and eSATA ports. The latter allows you to add a super-fast external 3in hard disk, which will be quicker than the internal one. This is a useful feature for those dealing with large amounts of audio and video. The internal 250GB hard disk should be large enough for most people, but an eSATA drive could still be useful for fast backups. The laptop has fast Draft-N wireless networking and Bluetooth for connecting to peripherals and mobile phones.

The 17in screen isn't as bright as those of the other laptops, but it looks fine when viewed in isolation. Colours are vibrant, accurate and flattering to photos and videos. The keyboard is a little spongy, but the large chassis means there's room for a numeric keypad and no need for shrunken keys. The touch pad feels accurate and responsive and the laptop comes with a small optical mouse, which is easier to use than the touch pad when the laptop's on a desk. Asus supplies a carrying case but this isn't a laptop for regular travel, with its 3.5kg weight and poor battery life. It lasted for just one hour and 39 minutes in our light-use battery life test.

The Asus's Radeon HD2400 graphics chipset gives it some 3D performance, and it managed 9.7fps in our Call of Duty 2 test. Dropping the resolution to 640x480 and switching off anti-aliasing gave 27.4fps, which is just about playable if you can put up with crude image quality. Its 2.2GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 3GB of RAM are up to intensive media-editing tasks, as shown by its impressive score of 178 in our 2D application benchmarks.

Asus's F7Sr isn't much good for use on the move or for playing games, but as a general-purpose laptop for the home its power, plentiful connections and large screen make it an excellent choice. It's our Best Buy.