It's a measure of how competitive the computer industry is these days that £500 can be considered relatively expensive for a home notebook. While it's true that there are plenty of notebooks available for more, they tend to be aimed at gamers and people who require lots of power for video editing, or other specialist applications.

For the rest of us who want to surf the internet, deal with emails and do a little typing from time to time, it's possible to pick up a computer that's able to do all that for less than £300. In fact, the Asus Eee PC represents a whole new price floor, at £200 for a notebook that, while small, does everything that many people want.

So why is it worth paying £500 for the Medion MD96625 notebook? Let's take a look at what you get for your money. The heart of the computer (and its brain) is the Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 processor, which runs at 1.66GHz. That's followed up with 2GB of memory and a 160GB hard disk for file storage.

The processor isn't particularly fast by modern standards but it's more than enough for most users, and the 2GB of memory is good – and it'll certainly be put to use by the Windows Vista Home Premium operating system that's installed on the computer.

Graphics are supplied by the Nvidia Geforce 8600M GS graphics card, an add-on that takes the image processing work away from the main processor, freeing it up for other tasks. The card also contains 512MB of its own memory, again freeing the main memory for other things. In addition to the 2GB of main memory, the graphics card is a distingu ishing factor between this and a £300 notebook.

A reasonable number of connections are provided – there are four USB ports, headphone, microphone and optical sound sockets, a memory card reader and two display sockets. There's a DVI port for monitors and a second socket for plugging into a high definition TV. There's also a multi-format DVD writer, network port and PC Card socket. There isn't a modem, but that's no great loss in this day and age.

What's more disappointing is the absence of a Firewire socket for connecting a digital camcorder. For a computer that's easily capable of dealing with video editing, it's an oversight.

The other slight problem is the keyboard: while generally it's fine, the space bar is mounted a little close to the case, which means that if you're prone to resting your hands low on the case while typing you'll end up hitting the tips of your fingers often. The 17in screen looks good and although it adds to the width of the notebook (there's enough room for a full numeric keypad) it doesn't add much bulk.

The 96625 is fairly easy to pick up and carry around and, although it's not light at 3.15kg, neither is it too heavy to lift. There's a 12-month warranty and it comes with Nero 7 Essentials software for disc creation.