Time for a new laptop? Six Windows 7 Laptops tested and reviewed

We put six of the new wave of Windows 7 laptops under the PC authority labs microscope

If you’ve wandered down your local high street past a branch of Harvey Norman or Dick Smith recently, you might have noticed something out of the corner of your eye.

Not just the copious number of Windows 7 adverts vying for your attention, but rather the tag line beneath them: “Time for a new PC”.

While it might be tempting to exhale an expletive-filled rant about how misleading such a statement is, take a deep breath. Whether you’re upgrading from Windows Vista or just in the market for a new laptop, Windows 7 is a huge leap forward.

The “Time for a new PC” advertising campaign isn’t telling you to throw out your old PC and dump your elderly laptop in the nearest hedgerow; it merely encapsulates how much of an improvement Windows 7 is.

It’s easier than ever to use, it feels faster than Vista on any machine – fast or slow, new or old – and it even looks snazzier.

So if you’ve been holding off buying a laptop until you could get one with Windows 7 ready to roll, then now really is the time to buy.

To make things even easier, we’ve done the hard work of rounding up six laptops from the largest manufacturers in the world and putting them to the test with our gruelling suite of tests and benchmarks.

And rest assured, all but two of these laptops come with Windows 7 pre-installed; not with a Windows 7 upgrade ticket, but ready to go right out of the box.

We’ve covered everything from low-power ultraportables to Intel Core i7-powered desktop replacements and, with prices starting from a budget-friendly $830 and rising to just $2300, you can be sure you’ll find the right laptop at the right price.

Feature table (click on image for larger size)

Buyer’s guide, plus, how we test

With everything from 13.3in ultraportables to 15in desktop replacements, there’s plenty of food for thought in this month’s group test.

If you’re looking for a desktop-replacement laptop with a full-sized keyboard and a large display that can last for several hours away from the mains, you’re in luck. Both the Asus UL50 and Acer Aspire Timeline 5810T are 15.6in laptops, but are much slimmer than most similarly sized machines.

They may be only 300g or so lighter than a standard 15.6in laptop, but if you’ll be carrying it around regularly, every gram counts. Intel’s Consumer Ultra Low Voltage (CULV) platform also helps reduce power consumption, enabling the Asus to survive more than ten hours away from the mains, and the Acer for more than seven.

The drawback is reduced power. The Acer managed just 0.77 in our benchmarks, while the cheaper and heavier Lenovo G550 and Dell Studio 15 scored a far better 1.59 and 1.10. They also count light gaming among their abilities, thanks to more power-hungry dedicated graphics chipsets.

Performance

We put each laptop through a series of benchmark tests using real-world applications such as Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop and dBpoweramp Music Converter. We repeat the tests six times to weed out any anomalies.

The overall result is relative to a score of 1.00 from our reference PC, a 3.2GHz dual-core Pentium D 840 system with 1GB of PC3200 RAM, a 10,000rpm Western Digital Raptor hard disk and Nvidia GeForce 6600 GT graphics.

We assess gaming performance using Crysis. Most of the laptops here have mid-range graphics chipsets at best, so we ran Crysis at Low and Medium-quality settings, at 1024 x 768 and 1280 x 1024 respectively.

We’d consider an average of 25fps to be a playable result. If a laptop can manage that, it’s a fair bet it will cope with most modern titles at moderate settings.

Battery Life

We run two battery tests. For our light- use test, we set the screen brightness to 50%, disable wireless networking and run a simple timer application.

For the intensive test, we turn the brightness up to maximum and push the processor to its limit with our multitasking benchmark. This gives us a minimum and maximum lifetime. In both cases, we use the power-management settings most suited to longevity and performance.

Features & Design

We look at objective measurements, such as the range of ports and connectors, networking capabilities and hard-disk capacity, as well as features such as Blu-ray drives and high-resolution displays.

We factor in software bundles but, more importantly, points are given for the warranty, as well as each company’s performance in our Best Tech Awards.

The rating also includes subjective points, decided by two members of the PC Authority staff, for factors such as build quality, style and the quality of speakers.

Value for Money

The Value for Money score is based on a weighted average of the Performance, Battery Life and Features & Design scores; we then factor in exactly how much each machine costs (including delivery) for a bang-per-buck result.

Overall

The Overall rating is a straight average of the Performance, Battery Life, Features & Design and Value for Money scores.

Battery life and benchmarks (click on image for larger size)

This Group Test appeared in the April, 2010 issue of PC & Tech Authority Magazine