Aries ProVision 2538 review

Putting together a notebook for only £499 is a real challenge.

Something almost always has to give, whether it's looks, power or the number of useful features crammed into the case. At first glance we were surprised at how handsome and stylish the ProVision was - surely it couldn't be good value too?

DESIGN AND PORTABILITY

For a notebook to be comfortably portable, it shouldn't weigh more than 3kg. The ProVision just sneaks in at 2.95kg. You can't forget it's there, but it won't make your bag feel like you've stashed a few house bricks in it either. It's certainly light enough to feel comfortable on your knee if you want to surf the Web while you're watching EastEnders.

As well as being relatively compact and light, the ProVision is also designed to appear sleek. It's thin and the base tapers towards the front. This gives the impression that the notebook is even thinner than it is. The outer chassis is finished in brushed metal, with a clean, slightly shiny, black plastic keyboard and surround. It's easily sturdy enough to be able to withstand everyday knocks and bumps, though. As usual with budget notebooks, the screen cover flexes more than it should, so you'll have to be careful not to damage the screen.

The keyboard has a nice clean action, with lots of travel in the keys. The layout of the keyboard is fairly standard, so you won't constantly be hitting the wrong ones. The spacebar is a little small, which will be pain for touch-typists, but this was the case with all three laptops. The trackpad, which takes the place of a mouse, is responsive as well as being comfortable to use.

The screen is bright enough for general use, though it did look a bit dark when we played our test DVD. However, the puny speakers sucked the life out of film soundtracks and music.

The ProVision's battery life of 1 hour and 54 minutes would be classed as good, but it's not outstanding. In a machine that costs as little as this, however, it's good enough. Our tests are intensive so, as with all the notebooks in this test, you can expect even longer than this if you're only using it to surf the Web or write some letters.

PERFORMANCE

Unsurprisingly, the ProVision wouldn't run our Doom 3 gaming benchmark - its graphics chip just isn't powerful enough. At this price though, that just isn't something you can reasonably complain about.

In our normal performance benchmark, this system actually did rather well, scoring 66.89 points. Our reference machine, which scores 100 points, is a desktop system based on a Athlon 64 3500+ processor with 512MB of RAM. For a budget laptop to achieve a score two thirds that of our reference machine is a real achievement.

The combination of a Sempron 2600+ processor and 512MB of 333MHz DDR RAM (the fastest in the test) clearly pays off. The ProVision even did well in the particularly demanding image editing tests - great news if you're an amateur photographer.

FEATURES

Like the Elonex, the ProVision comes with an 80GB hard disk. This is enough space to store a fairly large MP3 and photo collection. You could even save a few movies to your hard disk to keep you entertained on the move. As we've already said, you also get 512MB of RAM, though 64MB of this is dedicated for the exclusive use of the graphics chip. The remaining 448MB is still enough to run most programs without any problems. You'll only run into problems if you want to run lots of different programs at once, or work with very large files - for instance if you're editing video or music.