Advent Milano Laptop Review

The Advent Milano, a 10.2-inch netbook with Windows 7 pre-installed for a tempting £230. Even though the Advent Milano is one of the cheapest netbooks on the market but it doesn’t, not at all, does it look like a bargain-basement fare laptop. It’s well-proportioned for a netbook but not the lightest. It’s 3cm thick and weighs around a mere 1.2kg.

To add to the more premiere feel and look of this base level laptop the black lid has a glossy finish and the same pattern of pale concentric circles that we last saw on the Advent Roma laptops, and this motif is repeated on the silver interior. Even though the design is nothing remarkable but it is certainly more attractive than you might expect for this amount of money.

Advent Milano

Netbooks with an approximate 10-inch chassis are usually the perfect option if you want a half-decent keyboard in as a small a space as possible. Advent don’t seem to have squandered the opportunity with the Milano, the keyboard is nearly full-size, a great feat considering the laptop is so minuet and whilst the old-school keys aren’t quite as broad as those on some modern keyboard, they are still comfortable to type on. There should not be any trouble with the trackpad either, it’s big, and the lack of support for multi-touch gestures is no great loss on a netbook and a tactical move by Advent that has paid off.

The 10.2-inch Milano screen is a pleasant surprise. Advent has picked a sensible matte display that stays visible under all lighting conditions, and it is both crisp and bright.

The Milano does not offer anything new it comes with bare bones specifications. The Intel Atom N270 with a processing speed of 1.6GHz it is not a dual core processor but do not fear it does support hyperthreading which is handy and will support multi-tasking even in the absence of an extra core, a more than adequate processor for a pre-£250 laptop. Along side this comes a reasonable 2GB RAM and 250GB hard drive. However, the integrated Intel GMA 950 is a weak integrated chipset and for all you gamers out there, it’s not a GPU you want to be using.

If a relatively short two and half hour battery is more than adequate for your use and your needs are related more to the use of word editing and spread sheet management then perhaps this laptop is on your shortlist especially considering it’s cheap price tag.