Medion Akoya S5612

A laptop on a diet offered at Aldi stores

Medion’s Akoya S5612 notebook is available from 29 October from Aldi shops.

Its 15.6in widescreen has an anti-glare coating but was disappointingly murky at first glance. On further inspection the default screen brightness was very low – when increased it was better, if still slightly washed out.

The computer uses a low-voltage Intel SU2300 processor. This dual-core model offers some of the benefits of more expensive processors, but lacks the power of those models. It’s backed up with a large 4GB of memory, though, and a large 320GB hard disk.

Performance was fine – don’t expect it to cope with video editing or games, but for viewing video and listening to music, or office and internet use, it was fine.

The primary advantage of the low-voltage processor is that it gives off less heat, meaning that less cooling equipment is required and consequently the computer is thinner than most. It’s no Macbook Air but it is nicely slim and with the rounded edges of the glossy black case, it looks good all round.

The keyboard is large enough for decently sized keys, although it was a bit shallow for our liking – those whose fingers come down hard when typing may find it a problem. The trackpad supports multi-touch, which means that in addition to using a finger to move the mouse pointer you can use several fingers to make ‘gestures’ such as doing a pinching motion to zoom in to an image on screen.

It’s loaded with Windows 7 and has three USB ports, a memory card reader, eSata port for connecting external storage, can connect to both wired and wireless networks and has both VGA and HDMI sockets. The other upshot of the computer’s thinness is that there’s no CD or DVD drive, so software has to be installed using a USB memory key or by attaching an external drive (Medion supplies one as a paid-for add-on).

The Akoya S5612 is a decent computer, but we would rather sacrifice the slimness for a little more power. Still, at £500 it’s a decent deal.