Akhter AN825 review

Akhter is a new company to WL, but it has been in business for close to 30 years. When it got in touch and claimed it had a laptop with a battery that lasted ten hours and cost a little over £500, we thought it deserved a test.

The Akhter AN825 (£610 inc. VAT) isn't a miraculous long-life laptop. Rather, it is a standard machine that comes with a larger than average battery pack. Extending 40mm from the back of the machine and running across two-thirds of the casing, this is fine if you don't intend to travel with your laptop that often, as it's not the most practical of looks.

When it came to testing, we found the Akhter lasted for a little over six hours, which is impressive and will certainly get you through most of the working day.

The laptop also comes with an Eco-Mode button that when pressed drops the specification down into a lower state of use. Even so, it only added a further hour to the laptop's battery. While seven hours is great for those who need to be active all day, it's hardly ten hours.

You won't be able to run anything too taxing in this lower mode, but for everyday word processing and surfing the internet we found it more than acceptable. Dropping the laptop into Eco-Mode was instantaneous, but we found it took up to ten seconds for it to boot back up to full power. We may have concentrated at length on the battery life of this machine, but that is the AN825's main selling point. After all, the styling is a standard grey and silver plastic casing that feels robust and solid and errs on the side of practical.

Akhter supplies its laptops with a dual-boot choice of Windows Vista or Windows XP, so there'll be no compatibility problems with your older peripherals.

Integrated graphics

With an overall weight of 3.2kg, it isn't the most portable of machines. Aside from the larger battery cell, the 15.4-inch Super-TFT screen adds to the size of the laptop. The panel is supported by an integrated Intel GMA 950 GPU, which is an older chip that will struggle with anything other than basic tasks and running DVD movies.

In terms of specification, you'll find the AN825 is very much entry-level, with a 1.86GHz dual-core processor and 80GB hard drive. Despite the addition of 2048MB of memory, we still found slow-down with this laptop.

It would be too easy to dismiss the Akhter AN825 as a standard laptop with a large battery bolted on to the back, but the ability to drop down into Eco-Mode is something of an interesting feature. However, beyond this, there is little about this machine to make it stand out.