After my Advent Roma 1000 died a slow death, having always been pretty rubbish, I was overjoyed to be able to finally get a new laptop. I'm a postgraduate student, so use my laptop for a lot of writing, reading articles, and skiving off (this usually takes the form of Facebook, Youtube, the usual).

I will confess to being attracted by the look of the laptop. It's available in pink, purple, blue and red. I initially took a shine to the blue, but after a lot of trouble with PC World and Currys not having blue in stock I went for the red. The rounded corners, unusual colouring around the keyboard and small unobtrusive logo on the lid all attracted me. And in my view, if you're going to own it, you might as well like the look of it.

The battery came half-charged, so I was able to play with my new toy straight away. Setting it up was extremely easy, I was up and running in no time. Unfortunately it came with quite a bit of software that I didn't need or want, including lots of trial versions of games and shortcuts already on the desktop. While it's expected now I do resent that before I can start setting up my laptop I have to go through uninstalling and deleting things that the manufacturer has been paid to put on there. If I want Skype I'll install it, and if I want a shortcut to Snapfish I'll put it there. I paid for the laptop, I don't then want this advertising on it.

Anyway, that's just a little issue of mine. While deleting the rubbish I noticed that it came preloaded with a couple of games that I did enjoy, namely Cake Mania and Farm Frenzy, so it's not all bad.

In the two weeks I've been using it I've found the laptop fast enough for my needs. It boots up quickly, shuts down quickly, and works quickly. I'm used to a laptop slower than a funeral march, so in comparison any new laptop would be fast, but I have been impressed anyway. I'm also impressed with the number of wireless connections it's able to detect. Where my old laptop often wasn't able to connect to the wireless in a particular building at my university this one picks it up strongly.

A couple of other little things have been making my life easier, one of them being the textured touchpad. This means it's easy to find without having to take your eyes off the screen. It also supports gestures, so I can zoom in and out of pages by pinching and flicking. This has been a mixed blessing: it's handy when I actually want to zoom in or out, but it's very easy to do it accidentally, which is annoying. The keyboard is nicely designed, the only problem I've had is with the arrow keys. The up/down keys are half the size of normal keys, both occupying one space. As I'm not used to this I do keep hitting the wrong key, but I'm sure I'll get the hang of it eventually. I also like that there's no catch or button clicking needed to open the lid of the laptop, you just pull it straight open.

I'm finding the battery life acceptable, though other reviewers (on Dooyoo and elsewhere) disagree. I can eke out over five hours when not connected to the internet, which is much better than the one hour I was getting with the Advent Roma 1000, and is exactly what HP promise. When connected to the internet it's more like two and a half hours, which to me is still a luxury.

My only complaint is that it seems to attract fluff. I've also encountered an odd thing just twice: at the top of the screen one line of pixels flashes black. Restarting has solved the problem each time, and as long as this doesn't happen too often I'm not going to do anything about it. In other words, I'm incredibly happy with my new laptop. While it wouldn't suit a serious gamer, or someone who prefers a plainer look for their technology, I'm happy with the look and performance of my HP Pavilion G6.

Specifications:
Processor AMD Dual-Core E2-3000M (1.8 GHz, 1 MB L2 cache)
Operating System Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium 64
RAM 4 GB DDR3
Graphics card AMD Radeon HD 6380G Dual GPU 1 GB DDR3 dedicated, up to 1.98 GB total
Screen type High-Definition LED BrightView Display widescreen
Screen resolution 1366 x 768 pixels
Screen size 15.6"
Screen features LED BrightView
Hard drive 500 GB SATA 5400 rpm
Optical disk drive SuperMulti DVD±R/RW with Double Layer Support
Memory card reader Multi-Format Digital Media Card Reader for Secure Digital cards and Multimedia cards
Modem/Ethernet Integrated 10/100 BASE-T Ethernet LAN
WiFi WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
Sound Altec Lansing speakers
Webcam 0.3mp
Battery Lithium-Ion 6 cells Up to 5 hours battery life
Size 374 x 245 x 36 mm
Weight 2.55kg