Product Reviews

Intel has done a lot of advertising for its Centrino brand, mainly consisting of people lazing around in parks while using laptops, none of which actually tells you anything. Centrino is just a brand name for laptops that use Intel chips, and to use the logo you have to comply with a set of specifications.

The Zoostorm 52-4401 meets the latest Centrino standard, known as Santa Rosa. This includes a number of innovations like quicker wireless connections, flash RAM to reduce startup times, a new graphics chipset, and support for the latest Intel processors. But not all of these parts are compulsory, and the Zoostorm only features the latter two.

The processor is a new Intel Core 2 Duo T7100. It's pretty quick, and made short work of our benchmark tests. It's impressive that you can now get a fast dual-core processor in a notebook at this price, and along with 1GB of RAM it ran Windows Vista very smoothly. If you're into memory-hungry tasks like photo or video editing, or just like to run several applications at once, some extra memory would be a good investment. PC Nextday will up the RAM to 2GB for an extremely reasonable £29 inc VAT.

The graphics chipset is also new, the Intel Graphics Media Accelerator X3100. It's not powerful enough for modern 3D games, and we couldn't get a playable frame rate on Call of Duty 2 even with low settings. That's normal for a laptop in this price bracket, and it's fine for running Windows Vista's fancy-looking user interface.

The Zoostorm comes with Windows Vista Home Premium installed, impressive given that many laptops at this price only have the cut-down Basic

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version. Home Premium includes Media Center, which is great for browsing your media files. It also means you can add an inexpensive USB TV tuner and make use of the free electronic programme guide.

Deceptively spacious

At 160GB, the hard disk is the biggest commonly available in a laptop. This will give you a fair amount of space to store your music, picture and video files, or even record a fair few hours of TV programmes if you get that tuner. The usual DVD writer is also fitted if you want to make backups or burn your own video.

From the outside, the Zoostorm doesn't look like anything new or innovative. The silver lid and black interior are reminiscent of hundreds of other laptops on the market. The styling is utilitarian and certainly won't stand out, but the machine feels fairly sturdy and is simple enough not to upset anyone's sensibilities. It's too heavy to recommend for regular mobile use, though, and with a mere two-and-a-half hours' light use exhausting the battery, you won't be able to stay away from a mains plug for very long.

There are four USB ports, two on the back and two on the right, for connecting peripherals. There's no FireWire port, so you're stuck if you need to get footage from most MiniDV camcorders. The only video output is the standard VGA D-sub PC monitor connector.

The built-in 15.4-inch display is a little disappointing. It's not very bright and lends a light bluish tint to whites. It has a matt finish, so you won't get unwanted reflections from sunlight or office lighting, but it looks a little grainy compared to the glossy screens now becoming popular. It's not a terrible display, but we've seen better, even on budget notebooks.

The keyboard is fairly good. It doesn't flex when you press the keys, and each key has a decent amount of travel. It could do with a more distinct action to let you know you've pressed a key, but overall it works fine, and is suitable for anything except maybe typing a novel. The touchpad is small but accurate, and its buttons click distinctly.

This isn't the most exciting laptop, despite the new Centrino stuff, but it does provide a lot of computing power and has no major downsides.