In a couple of weeks time I am going on holiday and I decided that I needed a Netbook for editing and cataloguing all of my photos and videos. So I went down to my local PC World, Staples, Currys and Waitrose to see what netbooks where on offer. I didn’t want to spend more than £250 so I my choice was quite limited. I liked the look of the Compaq/HP but the 60GB hard drive and the hard to use track pad ruled it out. I was looking at an MSI Wind but the screen was very small so I decided to go for the Advent 4214. It was only £250 had 1GB of RAM with a 1.6 GHZ Intel Atom processor and a 160GB HDD. Also it had a 10.2 inch screen, and a really good big track pad.  This is my first Advent and Advents wouldn’t be my first port of call but in this case it met my requirements the best. It came in a very well packed box and you get a really nice welcome pack which is a folder containing all of the CDs and various different documents. Everything was packed nicely and it I got a 10% off voucher for Office 2007. It doesn’t feature a glossy cover and it is very bland but it does look quite nice and it does have a fairly modern design. You can tell  it is a cheap and cheerful machine because the power button doesn’t light up and the microphone hole looks like a design fault.

The track pad is fantastic and is very easy to use, however I feel that the track pad could have been made little smaller so that the main keyboard keys could have been made a little bigger (the width is perfectly adequate but the height is on the small side. I also really don’t like the fact that the Fn key is in the bottom left corner rather than the Ctrl key. This is very annoying as on most computers the Ctrl key is always at the bottom-left of the keyboard.

The Advent has a very good battery which on the specification lasts 3 hours but I was able to get around 2 hours 50 minutes whilst running a few reasonably intensive apps so I was very happy with that. The wireless receiver is very good and it seems quite fast and connects very quickly.

Because I bought the device from PC World which is the sole owner of Advent I was landed with some bloated Tech Guys software. I quickly removed it and found some other annoying software that needed removing. There was this little app that loaded this massive semi-transparent picture on screen telling me that I had turned caps on or off (what was really annoying was that it did not have a close button). This was very annoying and I took great pleasure at uninstalling this very, very annoying thing which by the way cannot be uninstalled using the control panel. The machine came with Office 2007 pre-installed which saved me the bother of having to install it.

I really like this netbook and it is the right one for me in terms of specification and speed. I think that Advent have done a very good job at producing such an easy to use machine and I think that for the next model only a few tweaks will be needed for them to be on to a winner. I would like to see Advent remove the Tech Guys software but on a positive note there was almost no annoying software (unlike my HP machine).

I would rate this product: 9/10.