Advantages: Industry standard, good support, solid
Disadvantages: Doesn't like non-hp parts, develops noise

...be using a decent graphics card, but there again you probably wouldn't have selected this machine if that was your bag. Looks wise, it's pretty easy on the eye. With it's black case, silver front and trendy curves and vents it looks professional. These machines range from £300ish for the Celeron version and £400ish for the Pentium 4 version (I'd go with the P4). Support is very good from HP. When buying one from an HP Authorised dealer you will get a years onsite warrantee. Overall, this is a good PC and you won't have many problems.... Read review

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Advantages: Fast for a Compaq laptop, not bad price, nice size hd
Disadvantages: bit ugly, not very light for carrying around, quite large

...Compaq may not make the most desirable looking laptops, and this most certainly isn't going to make you fall in love with it, but I do like this laptop which I got a while ago for only £700! with 1.4Ghz P4-M, quite fast for a Compaq laptop, and a nice graphics card (mine came with a 128mb radeon gfx card) games and applications run nice and fast on this laptop What drew me to this was the 30 gig hard drive also, a definate bonus for my work, especially at this price. The main problem I have found though is the bulk of the laptop. It is very wide and heavy, not the idea for carrying around. I would probably have not bought the laptop if I had known I was going to carry it around a lot. The laptop comes with the usual software packages, windows XP home ed., MS Office applications, Windows Media player etc. There were... Read review

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Advantages: Reliable, Durable, Great display, Portable desktop
Disadvantages: None

...Nearly 4 years ago I bought myself my first well known laptop after 3 lots of non branded ones. There is a world of difference and with careful selection I ended up with the Compaq Evo N800. What a break that turned out to be. First things first - the screen is superb with top laptop resolution rather than the crappy max of 1280xnothing offered by most other models out there even today. 1400 x 1050 gives too small a font some might say. Load of rubbish. This screen has the best viewability I've ever witnessed by which I mean that it's easily readable from any angle in front of the screen. No, it's not widescreen but don't let that put you off. Battery time is a solid 2-3 hours depending on activity and even after 4 years of the same battery it's still the same. Layout of ports etc is pretty standard and the only thing... Read review

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Advantages: High Spec and a Few Hidden Extras
Disadvantages: Doesn't Really Look Like a Media Centre

...button and other crevasses. I am in no way trying to imply that this PC is ugly but you could find more attractive alternatives if you are planning to use it in your living room. Rating: 5/10 Comment: Nothing spectacular but not bad either ~*~Hardware~*~ The M7081 couldn't be much better in this department with a 3.2Ghz P4 processor, 250Gb Hard drive, Creative Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS 7.1 soundcard, Hauppauge analogue TV card and 1GB of DDR2 RAM to boot. The only thing that lets this PC down is the graphics card, an ATI Radeon X600 is nothing to be sniffed at but there are far better on the market but as yet I haven't found a game that the X600 will not run. Now to the best bit, remember the other sliding door on the front of the case, well, it opens to reveal a 160GB personal media drive, that's 160GB... Read review

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Advantages: Small Form Factor, Enhanced Cooling, Easy to service
Disadvantages: Processor speed is not the fastest around

...HP really have got it completely right with this box. If you're looking for a PC based till, then this is the box for you. Using the standard desktop PC as a base, adding some extras, and targetting it at a specific use really has worked here. The RP5000 is very similar to the HP Compaq Small form factor desktops, however, they've taken into account the fact the box needs to be able to cope with the less than ideal situations a shop floor can bring. They have added an extra cooling fan which is thermal controlled allowing the box to be used in small and often confined spaces. Other manufacturers in this area offer solutions with either serial or USB ports. The RP5000 offers both 12V and 24V powered USB, and 4 (yes 4) RS232 serial ports. This allows retailers to future proof their purchase because they have the option to upgrade... Read review

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Advantages: Flexible, Robust, Easy to service
Disadvantages: No USB ports on front

...As with many Compaq models you have the option of setting up your PC as a tower or dektop, and this Evo is one. In addition, you are also able to change the position of the CD/DVD & Floppy drives as required. So whether the case is standing on edge or lying on its side, the CD-ROM and DVD drives have their typical horizontal placement. HP also includes an extensive array of sophisticated manageability tools for system administrators, the Intelligent Manageability software suite encompasses tools for such remote management activities as system diagnostics via a Web browser, system wake-up, and the ability to disable USB and serial ports and to lock down the BIOS to secure boot-up sequences. The keyboard has programmable hot-keys for accessing the Internet. The base configuration of the D510 has integrated graphics. And for businesses... Read review

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Advantages: Great value
Disadvantages: none come to mind

...Hewlett Packard's latest offering is a budget PC that's geared towards budding digital photographers. Until recently, a budget PC may not have been able to run the software needed to edit digital pictures at a decent enough speed, but with the 3GHz Intel Pentium 4 contained processor in this Pavilion, that shouldn't be any problem. This is helpfully complemented by 512Mb of memory and a generous 160Gb hard disk. The memory only takes up one of the four slots on the motherboard, so you can easily add some more at a later date. The Pavilion comes with a 128Mb ATI Radeon X300SE graphics card. This might struggle with some of the latest 3D games at high detail levels, but it's very capable of dealing with anything else. I've used it with a few games and it handled them all brilliantly so until some new games requiring superior... Read review

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Advantages: Affordable
Disadvantages: Heavy

...will phone HP Tech Support and query this. Even at 1024, the text and graphics are not as crisp as they should be, in my opinion and comparing the same images on my old Dell. I have turned off font-smoothing (significant difference!), and updated the video drivers (more improvement), but its not as clear as it should be. Additionally, there is n o function to adjust the contrast of the screen. Brightness, yes. Contrast, no. Not good. Speed: Its slow. Granted, it is a Celeron processor, but this 2.8 GHz machine still runs slower than my old Dell with 0.8 GHz P3 processor and half the RAM. Additionally, I went online and discovered that the hard-drive speed is only 4200 rpm! I need to take this up with the shop I bought it from - they should have mentioned this! However, in their defence, Dell's Inspiron models also come with 4200 rpm HDDs... Read review

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Advantages: Good value for money
Disadvantages: The heatsink and fan

...Versatile computer, long lasting, reliable. Bought from John Lewis and came with a 2 year guarantee. I paid £400 for this computer 2 years ago. It contained Windows XP home edition now that is likely to be sold using the new Vista Operating System. Type: Value Processor Family: Intel 5 Series (Pentium 4) RAM: 256 MB Storage Capacity: 80 GB RAID: No Graphics Card: Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 900 GM Primary Optical Drive: DVD-ROM/CD-RW Secondary Optical Drive: None Monitor Type: CRT Screen Size: 17 inches The time it takes to boot up and load the computer from the power switch is very fast. It takes less than 30 seconds from power on, until the start screen can be seen. With time if adding files and other game programs the memory will become slower. 256mb ram is not enough i would suggest as I have... Read review

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Advantages: 800FSB P4 support, SATA, 8 USB2 connections, AGP 8X and 6ch Sound with SPDIF
Disadvantages: ASUS motherboard site can be down at times

...and fires data between them to effectively give you double the memory performance. Not to mention this board will support 4x sticks of memory up to an incredible capacity of 4GB Native SATA support. Serial ATA(SATA) is the latest technology for hard drives offering increased bandwidth to let hard drives be taken to the next level of speed and performance. What makes the SATA connections on the P4P different is that they are native to the chipset, normally when installing a computer with windows 2000 or XP and using SATA, you would have to load in special drivers for the OS to recognise it. Since these are supported by the chipset, you are able to just install your Operating System with no need for complicated driver setup. AGP 8X. It's not the size that counts, it's how much ASUS have packed into this, the board has the latest AGP 8x... Read review

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