In October 2002, with the start of university only a few weeks away, I was on the lookout for a new PC. After much consideration and visits to the usual on and offline PC suspects, I decided upon the Evesham Voyager 5614, a laptop with 2.4GHz Pentium 4, 256 MB of RAM and a 40 GB hard drive amongst other things. Some of the factors which swayed the decision in favour of the Evesham were the insistance of PC World/Dixons to point me towards the Advent machines, which I believe are associated with the group, and did not seem to have the best build quality or parts of any machine I've seen, and had unsual specs, such as 384 MB of RAM, and also scaleable on-board graphics, which reduce the amount of system RAM available and thus slow down the PC. Dell's high prices and need to add extras to create a PC of similar spec to the Evesham put me off, despite their good reputation.
Evesham, however, offered a good compromise between price and power, and their machines looked good as well as receiving much praise from the computing press and media. For £1291 (inc. VAT) I got the following:
2.4 GHz Pentium 4 Processor 256 MB RAM 40 GB Hard Drive 16 MB ATI Graphics Card 8x8x24 DVD/CDRW Drive Built in Ethernet/USB/Firewire/Infra Red connecivity 14.1" TFT Screen AC97 Onboard Soundcard 56k v.92 Modem
The lack of floppy drive may annoy some, but these are becoming increasingly rare as people use CDR/RW, USB keys, memory cards and the internet to transfer files.
The purchase of the machine was relatively easy, the only glitch being the unavailablilty of the RAM upgrade I wanted (see my review of the Evesham store/service), but this was not to prove a major sticking point.
Setup was incredibly easy. Upon turning on the PC, all I was required to do was to register a few programs, once this was done I was free to explore the machine and its capabilities. This was about 8 months ago, and since then I have experienced no problems. I have been impressed by the speed, capacity and ability of the PC to do everything required, including video editing, syncing with my new 3G mobile phone, infra red file transfer and even audio work (despite the AC97 built in soundcard being basic, and not really suited to recording) - as a DJ I am often using the computer to record mixes and create and edit tracks. It also handles applications such as games with no obvious failings, Championship Manager 4 has been run on it with several leagues on at once, and no real slowdown (this new version has killed some of my friends' older PC's/laptops). DVD playback is also fairly good, there is sometimes a bit of lag/blurring, but it is as good as any other laptop from the same era. Applications such as MS Office run without any problems, and Windows XP is an intuitive and stable OS.
Personally, I feel that the Voyager 5614 is an excellent machine, and if the current crop of Evesham machines is as good as this (press comments would suggest they are) then they are worth serious consideration to anyone looking for a new laptop. I strongly recommend Evesham and the Voyager range.
(Added in response to comments - cheers for the feedback)
Warranty wise, as far as I can remember (without digging out the documents) my machine has the standard Evesham 2 year warranty, which if it's anything like the one on my desktop PC should allow an engineer to be sent out to repair any major problems free of charge. Upgrade paths for laptops are generally quite limited, but there's a free PCMCIA slot, you could add external peripherals or hardware such as soundcards like the Creative Extigy via the USB ports, and it is possible to upgrade the RAM if you open up the case and remove a couple of clips - it should just slot in like normal PC RAM, but the staff at Evesham did warn me that this would be likely to invalidate my warranty if I did it.
Another couple of things I may as well add - the laptop came with everything pre-installed (OS, drivers etc), a recovery CD, all the drivers on CD, and some manuals and instructions, but these were slightly vague in parts, as many such documents tend to be. You also get cables for certain things, such as the modem cable for the 56k modem that's present.
More details
Memory / capacity
Excellent
Ease of use
Very easy
Range of Extra Features
Excellent
Instruction manual
Good
Manufacturer Support
Excellent
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