This was my first ever Dyson many years ago, and it is still going strong all these years later, although now it has been relegated to the garage to hover the cars etc since we have long since upgraded the household requirement to a newer Dyson model.

OK, this one is now a little battered and has a few knocks and scrapes. But it is all still intact with all the fixtures and fittings. The stylish combination of the yellow and grey may not have been everyone's cup of tea, but the overall design was neat and well thought out. It had a neat arrangement of the tools fitting into the back either side of the central main handle, which additionally passed into the extendable hose which was stored on the outside of it. A simple clip released the hose and handle affair to give you a good reach to hoover in the remotest of corners. The way the power cable unwraps off the back has also been well thought out. Whereas with other uprights you have to manually unwind the cable from the 2 cable hooks located top and bottom, with the Dyson you can turn the top hook through 180 degrees, thereby releasing the entire 8 metres of cable in one go.

When it first came out, I remember it was quite expensive at £239 (I sadly still have the original receipt!!) and I've noticed that you can still get them on eBay to this day, although very much cheaper now as they will often be second hand. In use in its day, it did have a very powerful motor at 1400 watts which did put it towards the top end of the hoover power scale, and the motor on this still provides more than enough suction today. To operate, you push the button on the front to start it up, press the front bit down onto the floor with your foot, and lean the upright bit back using the handle on the top, and away you go. Some people say that it is fairly heavy to use, but we didn't find it excessively so. Much of the time you are just pushing it around the floor rolling it on the wheels, for which it is nicely balanced in use.

One of the complaints that some people had with this model was that it was fairly noisy in use, and to an extent I do tend to agree. But I offset that with the brilliant cleaning performance and hence, it is not really something that bothers me enough to want to go out and get a different make. As I said before, I also have a newer Dyson model in the house and people also complain about that model being noisy as well.

When this model first came out it was something of a revolution because it was the first bagless cleaner, thereby giving 'no loss of suction' as the Dyson mantra went. Every other hoover design of the day still utilised the hoover bag which was buried deep in the machine, where all the dirt sucked up was whisked into the bag never to be seen until you came to empty it out. The Dyson concept though sucked the dirt and dust up into a clear chamber on the front of the machine, and this seemed to me to be the main dynamics behind why it suddenly became so popular and still is so to this day.

No-one likes to have a dirty house and whilst you ran your old traditional hover over your carpets, you never really saw the dirt after it was sucked up. Everything was hidden away. With the Dyson, you suddenly found that all the dirt sucked up was instantly put on display in the clear bin for all to see, going round and round in the internal cyclone that the design created. And every time someone bought a new one, the first thing you heard them say after using it for the first time was 'Oh my god, my house was so dirty'.

On our first venture with this, we ran our old hover over the floor first and then started up this Dyson to do the same. The suction was incredibly strong, so much so that it was actually lifting the fitted carpet from the floor. Bearing in mind that we had just hovered with our old hoover, it was quite shocking to see how much dirt and dust this thing was actually lifting out of the carpet, and by the time we had finished the lounge and the hall, the clear bin was almost full. Almost embarrassing, but at least we knew that it was working well.

A good design feature with this is the methodology used to empty the bin. You press a little button on top of the bin which is incorporated into the carry handle for the bin. The whole bin clips off and you take it to the dustbin, pull the little lever under the handle and the bottom flap opens to empty it. Clip the bin back onto the machine and away you go again. No messing around with bags and trying to fit them into a machine.

The overall design of the machine was also very modular, where you could easily remove tubes and parts to clear blockages or to service it. One of the important areas that people often tend to forget is the filter down on the left hand side. This needs to be cleaned out on a fairly regular basis, I believe Dyson quoted every 3 months, but it will depend on how dusty your house is. Don't clean it and the Dyson starts to struggle to 'breath', meaning the motor works harder to try and suck more air in, thus over-heating and then failing altogether. Cleaning the filter is simply a case of removing the spongy bit, rinsing it under water and letting it fully dry before you refit it.

So in summary, I'm totally hooked on Dysons. This DC07 model has proven longevity and is extremely reliable, never once letting me down in all the years of use. Definitely worth 5 stars.

Review also on Ciao under Randal1.