Advent 4401

I have owned this laptop since august 2008 for going to Uni with. It has been the perfect work companion for the whole time I've had it.

The fan is on all the time, but if you keep it clean (which you should do with all laptops) then it will stay quiet enough for skype, library use and other quiet situations or microphone use.

A couple of weeks ago my brother and I tested start-up time against a brand new windows 7 note book, my two and a half year old laptop was 1 second slower than his brand new notebook.

Excellent buy and would recommend for a second hand purchase

The advent laptop is very noisy and the battery life deteriorated within 6 months of buying it. My advent laptop is only 14 months old and the battery cannot last more than 5 minutes without plugging it onto power.

it is really a bad laptop for the amount of money i paid! the keyboard has sticky keys - basically the words trail my typing on the pad.

the battery charger conked off and i can't find the battery for this anywhere! what do i do???

what i liked was compactness but even that is absolutely worthless if the laptop doesn't work without the power chord...

All in all you expect to get what you pay for in this world; however I tend to use the rule that under a certain amount is deemed 'disposable' after a year and a day. I have had several of this Advent model through now (all literally just a month or under 12 months old; so outside of warranty), all showing much the same issue - initially with DC jack plugs arcing and burning out, but upon further investigation a short somewhere else on the motherboard as well - perhaps caused by the faulty jack. Unfortunately it becomes uneconomical so a replacement motherboard would be good - can you source them? Nope - even the Tech Guys at PCWorld can't, even though Advent is their own brand i.e. Advent is just DSG Retails' (PCWorld and alike) sticker; the makers are ECS and that's a no-go as well. My advice/personal opinion would be that if you are going to spend over £400 on a laptop (but are looking for budget) perhaps go for a DELL - easily sourced parts at reasonable prices, but the company is also very helpful whether in warranty or not. Further to that, try to use a local (qualified and experienced; not cowboy!) professional who works with companies like DELL - their service and contacts are usually much better and more helpful than large companies. Hope this is of interest.

Excellent little fella' !

Very good for students & businessmen alike, compact, lightwight and definitely good value for money. I didn't find it noisy as someone previously written, on the contrary, very quite for a laptop. Definitely reccommend it highly.

I've had this laptop for almost a year now and it fulfiled all my business needs. The battery life is exactly as described in the prospectus (2 hours) and I never had a problem with it. The screen size is pefrect for a frequent traveller, no problems using it in-flight, train or bus. The only thing I'd improve is the OS (comes with Vista), not the hardware.

I haven't had a problem with the Advent 4401, it doesn't get too hot on my lap for hours, so I'm very pleased with it. It's small enough that I can carry around but large enough that I don't have trouble working out what is written on the screen.

overall very happy with laptop, however the fan is far too noisy. The battery is shorted than expected, around an hour and the keyboard isn't the greatest, but for the price it does run very well. I use it for developing on and have never had an issue with it

I would recomend the Advent 4401 for busy business and students. Small, portable, easy to fit and operate in an open zone, webcam, dual core processor, nice ram and classy screen. Battery life is not that great, give you maximum of one hour and 15 minutes, webcam quality is not that great, NOT A GAMING LAPTOP!!I love mine so much and wouldn't change it for any thing else!

Small and compact quick and easy to use when you know

what you are doing

There are problems with the dvd re writer TSST Corp CDDVDWVTS-L632H ATA, it won't write to a single use cd in I Tunes, The Tech Guys tried a Dell fix but it did not work and did not come up with a solution.

I like the Advent but its annoying to have problems that cannot be fixed.