Asus X5DC-SX025V

Asus X5DC-SX025V review

Any manufacturer producing a sub-£299 laptop should be commended for making mobile computing as financially accessible as possible. Yet, while the Asus X5DC-SX025V is a very comfortable machine to use, it is largely outperformed across the board by the other laptops of a similar price. Despite featuring 3072MB of memory, the 1.2GHz Intel Celeron 220 processor proved the least powerful against its rivals here. As a result, performance is akin to that of a netbook – a very low-powered mini-laptop – and you'll be limited to running basic applications one at a time. While typing out a document in a word processor works fine, listening to your music at the same time will cause the laptop to slow down. Poor graphics Similarly, the SiS graphics card is the least powerful here by a long way and, while DVDs run fine, photo and video editing is out of the question. If this is a priority for you, the eMachines G420 offers significantly more in terms of graphical performance. The 250GB hard drive is generous, however, and provides room for storing thousands of MP3s and photos, so you'll have plenty to keep yourself occupied with when you're not busy working.