As schoolchildren and students, or at least their parents, gear up for the new academic year, notebook manufacturers are starting to plug their bargain-basement PCs to those whose needs stretch to little more than office and internet use.

As expected, the latest Fujitsu-Siemens notebook has shunned Intel’s new Santa Rosa platform in order to keep the price down, so there’s no advanced features such as Draft-N wireless or Turbo Memory. The computer has an Intel Core 2 Duo T5300 processor running at 1.73GHz, so it’s no slowcoach, but it’s not going to be at the front of the race either.

The 2GB of memory supplied as standard is a welcome addition, however, and alleviates the poverty of the Li1718’s graphics performance. The graphics card is an ATI Mobility Radeon Xpress 200M with 256MB of dedicated memory.

While a separate rather than an integrated graphics card usually indicates decent performance, this model is old and struggles to cope with recent developments, particularly in gaming. New games are therefore going to be a problem.

The video failings extend to playing DVDs and videos as well – the sample videos included with Windows Media Center were pretty much unwatchable in full-screen, although this was alleviated somewhat when viewed in a smaller window.

Graphics aside, running several applications simultaneously caused it no trouble at all. The 3D Flip and transparency aspects of Vista’s Aero Glass interface worked smoothly, although the computer became a touch slower with these turned on.

Our experiences with the notebook mirrored its performance in our benchmarks. It scored just 249 in 3Dmark05, with PCmark05 returning a slightly more respectable 3,259.

The design of the Amilo Li1718 won’t win any prizes, but it’s perfectly adequate, with a silver and black plastic case, and a fairly bare looking keyboard area beneath the 15.4in WXGA screen. The keyboard is usable, but we f ound it a bit stiff – anyone looking to do a lot of typing would be better off plugging a separate keyboard into one of the four available USB ports.

There are also Ethernet, a 56K modem and VGA ports dotted along the sides of the chassis, but there’s no PC Card or Express Card slot. Wireless is also included, as expected, in the form of 802.11g.

The battery lasted one hour and 31 minutes in our intensive battery test, which is a reasonable length of time. But with a weight of 2.8kg, we wouldn’t recommend it to those looking for a notebook to use on the move.

Along with Windows Vista Home Premium operating system, which is a bonus when the company could easily have plumped for Home Basic at this price, the Li1718 comes with Nero 7 Essentials and Microsoft Works 8.5, so students and pupils can get going immediately.

This computer will make a decent workhorse for most home users and, while it’s not quite portable enough for university students to take to lectures, it’s adequately powerful in most other areas. The only major area in which it falls down – gaming and video – is something most notebooks in this price range lack, so it’s not a big failing.