Product Reviews

Not long ago, spending less than a grand on a laptop would have left you with a sluggish hunk of ill-formed plastic that you could barely lift off the desk. Times have changed, and a quick wander around your local PC World will reveal budget-priced wonders with dual-core processors, high-resolution screens and spacious hard disks for just a few hundred quid. We've reviewed some of them this month in our group test.

But put that wallet away for a minute, because here's another one. Eclipse Computers have made a bit of a name for themselves in Computer Buyer with a series of award-winning desktop PCs offered for sensible amounts of cash. Now they've turned their attention to the laptop market, and the Evolution Mobile i55VSTA is on sale at just £600 including VAT.

Back in time

Given that this laptop shares its name with one of the hottest street cars on the planet, we were mildly disappointed to find that it looks completely normal, and feels decidedly plasticky too. You could call its design conservative, or if you weren't feeling so kind you might make reference to the unfashionable half of the 1990s. But it makes up for this with rather neat proportions, and its smaller than average 14.1-inch display means it doesn't demand a huge amount of bag space. Tipping the scales at 2.7kg, though, it's barely any lighter than much larger laptops with 15.4-inch screens.

Delving a little

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deeper, things begin to look more favourable. The specification is reasonable for the price. An Intel Core 2 Duo T5500 processor might not be top-of-the-range, but with two processor cores, each running at 1.66GHz, and a gigabyte of DDR2 memory backing it up, performance certainly isn't lacking. A score of 118% in our general benchmark proved that the Eclipse has more than enough poke to deal with even fairly demanding applications. The graphics chip, an nVidia GeForce Go 7300, managed a score of 25% in our demanding Call of Duty 2 3D game benchmark. That's a very creditable result for a budget laptop, and shows you'll be able to play many games on the Eclipse if you choose modest video settings.

Limited visibility

Unfortunately, what the Eclipse has in power it lacks in finesse. We understand the need for compromises on lower-cost machines, but the Evolution's screen goes slightly too far. Like most widescreen notebook displays, it has a resolution of 1,280 x 800, which offers plenty of desktop space and suits DVD movies perfectly. Or it would if the image quality weren't so awful. From the moment we turned the Eclipse on, we thought someone had dimmed the display to minimum. In fact, it's just severely lacking in brightness. Colour accuracy is poor, too, tainting the Windows desktop with a greeny-blue cast and rendering pure white as a dirty pale grey.

By comparison, the keyboard and trackpad are relatively virtuous, but not perfect. Although the pad provides a usable mouse alternative, we weren't very comfortable with the ridged buttons, despite their firm, positive action. The keyboard's soft, springy keys aren't well suited to extended periods of typing.

This definitely isn't the perfect budget laptop. Supplying Vista Home Basic, rather than the Premium version, which this machine would be quite capable of handling, is another misdemeanour that counts against the Evolution, which may be affordable but still won't be at the top of your laptopshopping list.