At first glance a Vista laptop for less than £500 seems like a terrific bargain.

The most basic of PCs and laptops have been more than powerful enough to handle everything but gaming for years now, and an update to Vista should just improve the situation.

Sadly the Vista installed here is Home Basic. This is a massive blow since Home Basic, quite frankly, isn't very exciting and we think it's not really worth the effort in upgrading to it from XP.

It lacks Vista Home Premium's DVD playback, Media Center, and the now-famous Aero interface. What's more, at the time of writing, the manufacturer version of Vista Premium is selling for £73, just £8 more than Home Basic version, although this low-spec notebook would struggle with the Aero effects.

The chassis and keyboard are solid and, including the power supply, the laptop weighs a reasonable 3kg. Four USB2 ports, a VGA out and headphone/mic-in sit on the chassis' sides. The system lacks a card reader, audio line input, Firewire and Bluetooth. Thankfully, though, wireless hasn't been forgotten and 802.11a/b/g Wifi is inbuilt.

The 15.4in widescreen LCD is bright and evenly lit, although its resolution of 1,280x800 limited our excitement. Software isn't particularly impressive either, with Hi-Grade bundling three months of Bullguard anti-virus protection and Sonic software for DVD burning and playback.

At the heart of the system beats a single core Celeron M 1.6GHz backed by 512MB DDR2 Ram, however, you are only left with 446MB to play with since 64MB is apportioned to the Via Chrome9 integrated graphics. The 100GB hard disk is generous in a laptop of this price, but the spindle speed is a lowly 4,200rpm when most other modern laptops pack 5,400 or 7,200rpm drives.

It scored 823 in PCMark05, which is dire and lower than all the laptops in our recent sub-£500 group test.

The system has a base score of 1.0 in Vista's inbuilt benchmarking tool, the Windows Experience Index. This is the lowest score possible and one which Microsoft says is enough to do most general computing tasks, such as run office applications and browse the internet. This score also reflects that you couldn't run Vista Premium's Aero interface.

The low Windows Experience Index conclusion was reflected in our experience when trying to play back a DVD - we were shocked to see the system stuttered violently and frequently lost frames during the movie, making the whole experience untenable. We went further and tried to play back a simple Mpeg4 movie file and again, frames were lost.

Vista's high processor usage has a bad effect on battery life. Hi-Grade sent us a 4-cell battery for testing which gave a DVD run-down time of 55 minutes. However, Hi-Grade says laptops will ship to customers with 6-cell batteries which should correspond to an 82 minute battery life, just about enough to watch a short film.

When first booting into Vista and without anything else installed or running, the system reported 65 per cent Ram usage. The lack of Ram and the incredibly poor graphics chipset, something that is vital now that Vista's graphical user interface is rendered on the graphics card rather than on the CPU, is mostly likely the cause of our DVD playback issues.

The laptop is also badly configured – every time you put it into low-power sleep mode the laptop turns itself off and you get a Windows Error Recovery message next time you boot into Windows.

In short, this laptop simply lacks the grunt to handle Vista and the result is an incredibly slow system that can't be used for any kind of video playback. If you do plump for this notebook we'd recommend you ask for it with XP.

However, this notebook adhears to Microsoft's minimum requirements for Vista Basic, so we can't be too harsh on Hi-Grade in that respect. But it does serve as a warning that just because a notebook is labelled Vista Capable, it doesn't necessarily mean it will run the new operating system smoothly.

Also consider:
Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo Pi 1505
The sub-£500 Fujitsu will make light work of heavy tasks with its dual core processor

MSI Megabook M670
If you love watching movies on the move, this is the perfect sub-£500 laptop

All notebook reviews