With its glossy lid and matt-black keyboard, touch pad and keyboard surround, the R60 looks elegant and businesslike. The keyboard and touch pad are both easy to use. As with nearly all the laptops here, the screen's glossy finish looks great but can cause problems with reflections. Otherwise, the laptop has everything we would expect, including an eight-speed DVD writer, SD card reader, 802.11g wireless networking and three USB ports. The only extra is a button to launch Samsung's Media Center-style software.
ADVERTISEMENT
This is a fairly basic program for organising your audio, video and image files, but we can't see who would use it over Vista Home Premium's more powerful Media Center. The 120GB hard disk is divided into two 50GB partitions, one for the operating system and one for data, with the remaining 10GB of formatted capacity devoted to a system restore partition.
Performance
An overall score of 133 in our application benchmarks places the R60 second in the group for 2D performance, thanks to a 1.66GHz Core 2 Duo processor and 2GB of RAM. The graphics chip can't cope with modern 3D games, scoring just 5.3fps in Call of Duty 2, but it should be able to handle older titles. Battery life was the best here at three hours and 10 minutes in our light-usage test.
Verdict
The R60 is a good all-round laptop, and looks more expensive than its £485 price would suggest. It also has the best battery life in the group, and is the only laptop here that's suitable for use on the move. It's overshadowed by HP's Compaq 6720s, though, which is far faster and has a bigger hard disk.
