Compaq wowed us in January with its V2340AP notebook which looked like a proper notebook but cost only $1299. It sat on the A-List unchallenged until Compaq ‘refreshed’ it with this model, the V2418AU.

The chassis is similar to before, it looks good with its matte black lid, silver chassis and grey keyboard – much nicer, in fact, than many notebooks three times its price. It weighs only 2.4KG - most manufacturers budget models tend to be over a kilo heavier. What’s more is that it’s very well built – the screen may flex a little when under pressure, but there’s nothing rattly about it.

The next plus points are the ergonomics. The keyboard is full-sized, well-weighted, and very comfortable to type on. The trackpad and buttons are good and there’s even a button to turn it off. We’re also fans of the hardware 802.11b/g WLAN and volume switches below the screen. The Altec Lansing speakers, while not particularly loud, are actually some of the clearest we’ve heard on a notebook. If movies are your thing then the 1280 x 768 glossy widescreen is a great performer, with decent colours and good viewing angles meaning you can use it as a portable DVD player (it rivals dedicated models in price).

Compaq also doesn’t skimp on features. Instead of a DVD-ROM we now have an excellent dual-layer DVD writer. There’s also a PC Card slot, mini FireWire, memory card reader and a proprietary expansion port.

Naturally, in a system this aggressively priced there must be compromises and these come with the internal hardware. Interestingly Compaq has ditched Intel’s platform and embraced AMD. There’s now a 1.8GHz, Socket 754 AMD Sempron instead. This coupled with a 40GB, slow 4200rpm hard disk and 256MB of RAM produced a score of 0.51 in our benchmarks – way behind our reference desktop PC. The Ati Xpress 200M graphics don’t warrant game playing either. Battery life was modest too. It lasted two-and-a-half hours in our light use test and one hour 39 minutes in our intensive test.

But it isn’t about performance. While encoders and digital photo enthusiasts should look elsewhere there’s ample power for general multimedia, browsing the web and office applications. Such people will also warm to Microsoft Works 2005 and the Sonic DVD editing applications (Digital Media Plus, RecordNow and MyDVD) which are bundled. That said, it’s worth considering buying an extra SODIMM memory module – 256MB will cost you around $40 and will improve the general responsiveness of Windows.

We’re not surprised or critical of the standard one year RTB warranty because, at $1215, what do you expect? Quite simply, if you’ve been wanting a notebook but couldn’t afford one, this $1215 beauty is the answer you’ve been looking for.