Product Reviews

The average price of a budget notebook in this month's Labs on page 158 is just over £560 including VAT. The C2400 from Hi-Grade costs a little more at £650, and it isn't as powerful as most of our budget models. Hi-Grade has invested the money in a lightweight widescreen chassis instead.

Weighing only 2.45kg, it is lighter than most notebooks at this price. It's slim but feels well built with absolutely no flex from its chassis. There's a 14" widescreen display, supporting a resolution of 1,280x768. While not as big as a standard 15" display, the higher resolution is useful when working on complicated applications.

We ran our suite of image-quality tests on the display. It had a slight graininess to it, but colour and greyscale tests were displayed well, and it's bright enough. The widescreen ratio is great for watching DVDs and we enjoyed Spider-Man 2, which

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had decent contrast and no motion blur.

The front of the chassis has an IR receiver, which works with a mini remote control stashed away in the CardBus slot. This means you can control DVD and CD playback from a distance. The speakers are good enough for a small notebook. They're quite clear, but lack volume and bass.

When you need to do some work, the keyboard won't let you down. The keys have plenty of travel and decent feedback and are all well proportioned. The touch pad isn't shaped to fit the widescreen display, but it's accurate in use. Three USB2 ports, a FireWire port and S-video out allow you to hook up to several devices easily. Digital camera owners will be pleased with the memory card reader that supports MMC, SD and MS.

Application performance is limited by a lack of memory. Hi-Grade has made a false economy by fitting only 256MB in this notebook. It struggles to deal with large files such as those in our image-manipulation test. If you want to take on anything but the simplest tasks we'd recommend an upgrade to 512MB. Even then the 1.4GHz Celeron M processor cannot compete with the excellent Pentium M range. Battery life was poor at less than two hours in our low-usage test.

The C2400 has a well-designed chassis with lots of entertainment options. Some home users won't be bothered by its lack of performance in our tests, but consider some of the cheaper alternatives in our Labs test before making a decision.