In our new house we have turned one of the bedrooms into an office/study where we have installed our main desktop PC. This is the PC that I use for my photography and as such I have to admit that this room has pretty much become my domain as all my camera stuff, software, dual monitors, graphics tablets etc does tend to cover just about every spare surface. Understandably my wife no longer really wants to use this PC and so last week she decided to buy herself a new laptop to use on our home network.

As she 'only' needed to be able to surf the web, run office applications, view photos etc there was no point on forking out a small fortune on a laptop that was more of a replacement desktop PC so we had a look around to see what was available at a more realistic and affordable budget of £400.

I have a Dell Latitude laptop which my company bought for me and although I'm normally a big fan of Dell's desktop PC's I've always felt that their laptops were a little lacking and slightly over priced compared to what you can get elsewhere so that and the fact that we didn't fancy having a laptop that could suddenly burst into flames ( read more here ) meant we had to look elsewhere.

And all for just £360+VAT which I think is incredible value for money. We had never ordered from Laptops Direct before and had heard both good and bad things about Acer Laptops so we were a little cautious about placing the order but we didn't need to be. We placed the order on a Friday and the laptop was delivered the following Tuesday. Within minutes of unpacking it we had it logged onto our network and Gail was happily surfing the Internet. It's fair to say that this laptop isn't going to win any awards for speed but for general office applications and surfing the web I'd have to say that it is pretty much ideal and I'd hardly call it slow anyway. A nice touch was that the hard drive of the laptop had been partitioned with Widows installed on the primary 30GB partition leaving ample room for any other applications you may want to install meaning that the secondary partition can just be used for your data. In this configuration backing up your data is simply a case of selecting drive D: and that's it. For just over £400 (inc VAT) I'd be hard pushed to fault it and most importanly Gail is delighted with her purchase!