Advent 7111

i bought this unit from pc world december 2006 and it has been used daily and still going nice.upgraded to vista and 2gb memory.now runs windows 7 very well including aero.the only thing against it is the hard drive only 80gb,way to small but external hard drives are great.screen would have been better it it was a glossy finish.this has been the first laptop that i have bought that has been no problem at all.

Bought in Oct 06, so now 3 1/2 years old and used fairly heavily most days in my business. Using it to write this review.

Totally screwed up about two years ago. Tried to install dual boot Linux. Cocked up. All my fault. Got boot/driver cd from Tech Guys. Re-installed XP and Linux Ubuntu again. Never looked back.

Have upgraded to 320 Gig HD and 2 Gig RAM. Using AutoCAD, Photoshop, Office 2007, Linux Ubuntu no probs.

Hardware problems, absolutely none.

Used to to spec and build my own PCs. Nowadays, not worth the hassle.

Why not 5 stars? Nothing's perfect, leaves room for improvement ;-)

H.

The Advent 7111 is an excellent piecs of kit, had mine about 2 and bit years...apart from the odd battery / charger problem, nothing. Well worth the money, great buy for me based then.

The good points of the Advent 7111 are that the screen is wide, and clear. It keeps crashing, turning off at unexpected times.

Great laptop, never broken down!Have installed Vista Home premium on it and now my 4 year old son uses it more than I do!

The Laptop comes with Media Center pre-installed and all of its drivers, which is very good. Also, the 1 GB of DDR2 memory and dual-core CPU bring a significant overall performance boost. The harddrive is not too bad as it comes with 80 GBs however, it can be dauntingly slow at times. The LCD widescreen is ideal for watching movies but disappoints at the quality sector because of poor contrast and brightness as well as being particularly delicate which can, in turn, lead to the appearance of some artefacts in time. This poor quality choice also seems to reflect on the poor insulation of the sound connectors as output tends to get a little buzzy if the screen is open. Moreover, the same sound connectors are made from a very low quality plastic which is very tough and resilient at first but tends to "dry-up" and crumble easily within a few months of normal usage. The case is not an exception and it is very fragile as it is made from a rather thin plastic which can cause the corners to develop cracks and the painting tends to smudge off within a year or so.Overall, it's a great laptop in a bad "wrap" (the case). It's a great deal for its money and will fulfil its role as an office tool excellently!

The day after I wrote my previous message I went to an electrical store called Maplins to try sort of my power cable problem. They sell a universal power cable for £35 which has worked an absolute treat. The power works better than it used to now and I'm glad I went there because the only other option would be to of gone to PC World where they would probably send it off and fleece me out a lot of money. I took my laptop along to Maplins and I was able to test the universal cable in store before I bought it. As it turned out my original power cable was simply dead. I would recommend this unviersal power cable to any one who have had similar problems. It has approx 10 cable ends which allows it to fit any laptop. This has saved me a lot of time and money as replacement cables can cost in excess of £100 and can take many days to arrive. I was also relieved to find it was the cable not the laptop which was the route of the problem.

Thanks to Maplins!

Have had this for under 2 years and have had it sent away about 6 times for several problems such as not turning on, faulty charger etc etc. Now for the past few months its been randomly restarting im guessing this is because there may be a problem with the psu in the laptop itself. Also the screen gets like a quick flash which Im guessing is due loose connections.Not to mention this is a rather laggy machine and the graphics card is too basic and the closing mechanism is very cheap. This is not a media machine at all. If you just want something basic for work and dont have many applications open at one time then this is the machine for you. I wish I knew how unhappy I was going to be with this machine was before I blew £500 on it in December 06 and now im having huge problems doing my coursework since its so poor in my opinion.

I have had two previous laptops (Sony & Compaq) and I must say the Advent one I have now has pleasantly surprised me in its performance and speed. I use it for work, programmes such as Revit and CAD and social use including gaming and it has always ran efficiently and quickly for everything. The laptop itself is simply the best around for the price, I have had mine for a year and a half and never experienced problems associated with the actual laptop, however the power cable is a different story - it simply doesnt work-I plug it in as normal but the battery light doest come on in the bottom right hand corner despite having the green light on on the cable.

I've owned an Advent 7111 fo nearly 2 years and use it 10 hours a day, every day for heavy business use.

I run MSSQL, a webserver and Photoshop and it handles it all.

It has been the most reilable computer I've used in 20 years.