The Hp G60 was the first new laptop I had ever bought. I got it from PC world in March 2009, and paid around £420.

It was the best spec for the price in the shop at the time, and seemed to do everything I wanted it to. The processor is an AMD Turion X2 RM-72 2.1 GHz. I had never used AMD chips before, so was curious to see how it would perform. The screen is a standard 15.6" TFT 1366 x 768 ( WXGA ) - BrightView. It is sharp and bright, and has a nice range of colours. The laptop has an Altec Lansing stereo speaker system, which is loud and punchy. It competes well with my dedicated system on my desktop PC. Even at full volume it doesn't distort and handles low bass frequencies well.
The laptop has an Nvidia Geforce 8200M graphics card, which is rated as a class 3 card. Class 1 are the best, class 5 the worst, so this sits in the middle. It can cope with everyday tasks easily, but show it a game and it will shrivel away and hide. I could just about play Call of Duty 4 on the lowest settings.. And I mean only just..

Still, The laptop doesn't pretend to be a gaming laptop. Its designed for light home use. And this it does admirably. The aforementioned AMD processor works hard in the background, making sure everything works smoothly. The computer can handle processor intensive applications and hardly slow at all. This is helped by the 3GB of ram installed. You can upgrade to 4GB, but unless you plan on running a 64 bit Operating system, there is no point as 32 bit systems only recognise 3GB max.

The laptop came shipped with Windows Vista Home basic. This does everything you expect, and wont go into detail here.

The laptop has all the usual ports and sockets you expect to find. 3 High speed USB ports, VGA, Ethernet and modem, mic in and headphone out, plus also a bonus HDMI port. This allows you to connect the laptop to a HDMI compatible TV or screen. This is great for watching DVDs through the laptops DVD +/- DVD ROM drive. This drive also has lightscribe technology, meaning you can actually laser on images and text to blank discs. No more scruffy marker pen writing on your copied CDs!
The laptop a webcam and mic, I don't use this a lot, but it seems to work well with good image quality.
The keyboard is well spaced with positive touch. A separate keypad is useful on the right. The track pad is smooth and responsive and incorporates a very handy vertical scroll bar, making web page navigation a breeze. A 5-1 card reader makes getting your photos off a camera really easy, and accepts most standard card formats. A large 250 GB harddrive should be more than enough for most, and although only 5400rpm, it doesn't affect performance noticeably.
Wifi is built in, but only b and g standard. N would have been nice to see, but this would have pushed the price up. I have never had s problem getting signal from the top of my garden.

The laptop weighs in at 2.8 KG, which is reasonable considering its size. Not to heavy to carry around should you wish.

Battery life is average. A single charge can last anywhere between 6 hours and 30 minutes depending on what you are doing. Expect a good 4 hours if just light work or surfing the net.

The overall build quality is ok. I cant say any more really. The edges can be sharp and I found it uncomfortable to use for long periods. The plastic is shiny which shows up dirt and finger prints, which is annoying, I expected better from a company such as HP.

Overall the laptop is fine for light home use such as web surfing and word processing. An odd movie and reviewing your pictures is fine, although anything too taxing will result in sluggish performance. The machine can run the likes of Photoshop and Google Earth, however the limitations of the graphics card show themselves in these sorts of applications.