Advent 7039

Although notebook computers offer great portability, one area that doesn't usually stand out as a selling point is graphics performance. It came as a rather pleasant surprise then that this is one area where the Advent 7039 scores very highly.

It comes equipped with a 64Mb Radeon 9600 integrated graphics chip, which is the fastest graphics chip we've yet seen in a notebook. It coped adequately with all the latest 3D games, which will undoubtedly please those partial to the odd shoot'em-up.

The rest of the system generally offers good specifications, such as an AMD Athlon 3000+ 1.58GHz processor and 512Mb of memory, which is enough to run most Windows applications very well.

The 7039 is also the first notebook we've seen that uses the Athlon 64 processor. Our system tests showed that this processor performed just as well, if not better, than a mobile Pentium 4 processor, which is a great achievement for AMD. However, there's hardly any software on the market that can fully exploit a 64-bit processor, so it's unlikely you'll properly reap the rewards until much later in the year.

The fact that none of the memory is shared with the onboard graphics is a huge advantage and the 7039 copes extremely well with Office software, as well as more rigorous tasks such as image editing.

The 7039 comes with a 40Gb hard disk, which is fair for a notebook of this price, but if you're keen on digital media files such as MP3 and DivX, that space could be eaten up quite quickly. Thankfully, the notebook comes with a DVD/CD-RW combination drive for you to create audio CDs, watch DVD movies or back up your data. It's a shame that Advent hasn't stretched to a recordable DVD drive, but for a notebook PC of this price, that's not entirely unexpected.

On the outside, the 7039 is well built. It's not the most stylish of notebooks, but the keyboard has enough space around it for comfortable typing. The 15in screen has a resolution of 1,024 x 768 and produces a clear image in both Windows applications and games. The battery life tested at around two and a half hours, so you should be able to squeeze in at least one film while on the move.

Additional peripherals can be connected to one of four USB 2 ports and a FireWire port. There's also a PC Card slot for further hardware upgrades if needed. Digital camera users will be pleased with the built-in memory card reader, but it's worth noting that it only reads SD and Memory Stick formats.

The 7039 is also equipped with Wi-Fi, which enables you to connect to any wireless networks in your vicinity. This seems to be a standard feature in notebooks these days and is extremely useful if you rely on the internet yet spend a lot of your time on the move.

All in all, Advent has managed to put together a notebook that offers a very good set of specifications for a fair price.

Although other notebooks in this price range come equipped with a recordable DVD drive, the excellent graphics available with the Advent are a justifiable alternative. The notebook also comes pre-installed with Microsoft Works, Nero and Cyberlink Power DVD, as well as a 12-month collect-and-return warranty.

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