...but *I* wouldn't give a £500 laptop to a 7-year old.

I don't know if that's an old model, but I have a SZ65 and can get a good 4-5 hours out of it

I wouldn't give a £200 laptop to our sixteen-year-old, because I know (from bitter experience) what would happen the first time its wireless connection failed when he was in the middle of chatting to some underaged floozy.

Kids, eh? Tch.

I thought I was being extravagent shelling out 600 sovs on a Samsung R700 to replace my ageing desktop.

You could get 2.5 Eees for that money - if portability is your thing.

I know what you mean Ken. It used to be the case in reviews that a lazy reviewer would say that you would buy a new PC for yourself and 'then give your old PC to the kids'. The problem is that kids put quite a load on laptops and PCs as they have a gazillion windows open and thrash the thing with Flash animations and music galore. The fact is that most of us adults are able to work with an oldish PC while kids need dual cores and all that good stuff.

The question is, will we pay for it.

As for the battery Craig I've read reviews of the 2920 that refer to significantly better life however I can only report what I saw myself.

Just how does 550quid count as budget? especially the the week that elonex are due to release their £99 laptop

£550 is not what I'd class as budget...

6 months after buying my 5920G, which is used every day still holds an excellent charge, I can expect at least 5 1/2 hours battery on power saving mode with the speakers turned off, cranked up to over 6 hours with wifi disabled.

Turn it to maximum performance and the battery life drops to 3 1/2 - 4 hours or around 2 1/2 hours gaming.

The screen is fantastic, really bright and vibrant and with an HDMI output on the laptop, can easily be used on a big widescreen.

My only problem is those silly soft touch media buttons, why on earth they put them on the right-side of the keyboard instead of below the screen I will never know. They are easy enough to disable regardless, and I see they are not included in the 29xx series.

If the 29xx series is anything like the more expensive 59xx series then expect fantastic results!

I'm typing this on my low-cost EEE PC (4G with webcam @ £215 inc delivery) and that is closer to a "budget" laptop in my book.

For me, a budget laptop is less than £250 new or £100 on eBay ... so if you must give the little monkeys something to waste their "study" time on then buy some old kit on eBay ... or make them go out and work and buy their own (paper round and saturday job got me my first 8-bit micro nearly 30 years ago 8-)

$550 is budget, £550 is not.

It comes with a Intel Core 2 Duo T5450 - 1.66GHz CPU not a T7300 2 GHz.

Joe

I got the CPU spec from running CPU-Z and have just checked with Acer which confirms that I was correct in my review.

My apologies. They need to update the acerdirect website because the price link from this review states 1.66 GHz.

Yes, this has been noted... but jeez, here in the backwards USA, *best buy* has a Dell Inspiron with (albeit) an AMD 64 X2, 2gb, 250gb, and a 17" screen. And it's $949 instead of the $1050 that this Acer is.

To get to $1050 on Best Buy's site you have to go through about seventy laptops!