Advent 5313 review

PC World produces its own in-house brand of laptops that come under the Advent name.

While lacking the same brand awareness as a Sony or Toshiba, they are intended to offer the best specification for the price. At £399 (inc. VAT) the Advent 5313 is an easily affordable machine.

The design is a mix of black and silver with a ribbed effect to the plastic body that is mirrored in the high-gloss of the sturdy and well-supported lid. The build quality is excellent for the price and feels solid in the hand.

Lightweight laptop

Weighing 2.4kg, this is a reasonably light machine that would make a good first-time laptop for a student. However, while it's portable, the battery life is less than ideal. We managed to get a mere 85 minutes from this system, which isn't even enough to return a benchmark score, let alone use the machine away from the mains power for prolonged periods.

The screen is a 615.4-inch Super-TFT panel that is bright enough for most situations. It even maintained its brightness level when running on battery power, which goes some way to explaining the poor battery life.

When it comes to performance, this machine has been fitted with a great specification for the price with an Intel 2GHz Core 2 Duo processor, 2048MB of memory and a 200GB hard drive. We found that applications loaded smoothly and ran easily. This isn't the most powerful machine and you won't be able to run high-end tasks, but for everyday work it's more than fine.

Flawed keyboard

The keyboard is pushed to the rear of the case, which leaves rather large palm rests. This means you find yourself leaning over the machine in order to reach the keys. The individual keys are of a good size, but due to the shape of the board, it's a little tricky to grow accustomed to. What's more, the keys need a solid strike in order to register, so this isn't the best machine for touch-typists.

The touchpad is slow to respond, but what proved worse was the single-strip mouse button, which was awkward to use.

Features have been kept to a minimum. You'll find a DVD rewriter built into the left-hand side. There are three USB ports on the rear and a single one on the side, along with an SD card slot.

The Advent 5313 offers reasonable performance for the price, but first-time users may well find they soon outgrow its usefulness. The keyboard and touchpad lack responsiveness and, worse yet, the battery life is so poor you'll find this laptop spending more time on a desktop than on the move.