I've not done a product review on this blog before, but hey, there's a first time for everything. Actually I wrote this for the Kelkoo site and then the stupid thing wouldn't load properly in Firefox (or IE7) and I didn't want to waste it so I thought I might as well just post it here instead where someone might still get the benefit of it. Anyway, I recently bought one of these to replace my brick of a 1ghz Toshiba satellite which ran like a pig and was at least 4 years old, and I am loving it. The difference is night and day. The Philips only weighs 1.85 kg but the Intel core2duo cpu packs a real punch (and this is coming from someone who has always used AMD cpus when they've built a PC in the past), laughs at most office tasks and feels as nippy as a desktop.

It comes with Windows XP Media Centre Edition, but isnt fully patched, so go to Windows Update and download the latest updates to make sure your security is up to date. Not much software is bundled (apart from Microsoft Works); you maybe get a trial of Norton, basically useless. Download the free versions of AVG anti-virus and Zone Alarm as well while you're at it. Philips do give you their own DVD playing/disc burning programs but I can't comment; I installed my own packages.

The lack of tv-out is an omission, as is a hardware volume control, particularly if playing a game. It took me a while to realise you can use the function keys to change the volume and that you don't actually have to alt-tab back to the desktop to change the volume level. Lack of Bluetooth support is another issue, but at least there is onboard 802.11g wi-fi - though this drinks your battery, as wi-fi will. Otherwise battery life is decent, well over three hours. But I suppose at this price point it's churlish to complain about such things.

Although the screen is only a 12” one, the resolution is good enough to make watching a movie possible (volume is a touch on the quiet side but dialogue is audible) and the viewing angle is excellent, with a glossy finish clearly inspired by Sony's X-black screens on the vaio range. There are no legacy keyboard or mouse ports, no legacy printer port, just 3 USB2 ports and a mini-firewire port on the sides with mic and headphone jacks on the front. You do get a 4 in 1 card reader that does SD, memory stick, memory stick pro and MMC cards – no CF.

The onboard intel graphics will even handle some light gaming, which was a pleasant surprise. Games aren't everyone's thing, but I like them, so to see that it could run Fifa 2007 smoothly with everything turned up was a bonus. Tiger Woods 06 actually made it creak more, even though it was last year's version, but I reckon that if you tweak the settings you can play anything more than 18 months old with few issues, which opens up quite a lot of possibilities.

So, despite missing features that one might want on one's ideal laptop, this is a budget machine, and when that is taken into account, it really can't be beaten. With a 100 gig hard drive and 1 gb of ram, plus a free upgrade to Vista Home Premium, this is an excellent deal. If you want a new lightweight laptop but can't afford an ultraportable at the > £1000 price point, then you should think hard about getting one of these. The only thing I should perhaps mention is that in one of the reviews I read before I bought it someone said they'd tried to install Linux on it and failed utterly, it wouldn't even boot, but they didn't say which distribution this was I don't think. And in any case, that's the sort of thing that tends to get corrected over time. Overall, very highly recommended.