Evesham.com is one of the first UK independent suppliers to start shipping notebooks based on AMD's new Mobile Athlon 4 1500+ processor, which in common with some other AMD CPUs is named according to a speed-equivalence rating of AMD's own devising. The actual clock speed of this processor is 1.3GHz.

The Voyager 5500A wins the prize for having the most memory installed in this group, with a whopping 384MB, which should even be enough to cope with the next version of Windows after XP. The hard disk is also larger than average at 30GB, but the optical drive proved to be a standard 8-speed DVD-ROM rather than a fancy combo unit.

The overall build is similar to machines like the NEC Versa and the Rock Sigma, also in this group test, which is to say it's acceptable without really standing out. As with all the portables here except the Toshiba, the Evesham Voyager 5500A is a classic three-spindle design with fixed rather than modular drives.

Like the ACi Perfecta, the Evesham Voyager 5500A has an S3 Twister graphics processor which appropriates memory from the admittedly abundant 384MB of main system RAM. With four out of six machines reviewed here using it, it's clear that shared memory architecture (SMA), with its attendant cost-savings, is a popular approach with suppliers.

Evesham has seen the wisdom of not turning its back on 'legacy' peripherals in too much of a hurry, and the Voyager 5500A has both parallel and serial ports as well as a pair of USB connectors. It's also kitted out with an internal modem and 10/100BaseTX LAN adapter, not to mention two possibly redundant Type II PC Card slots.

The keyboard is acceptable though not quite as nice as the Toshiba's, but the necessary keys are large enough and there's just about enough room for everything. The screen is unsurprising with its 14.1-inch diagonal and native XGA resolution, but that's what you get for about £1,000. What matters here is that it's reasonably bright and free from any obvious manufacturing defects.

The low power consumption of the Mobile Athlon processor helped spare the batteries and we managed to keep going for around 2 hours 45 minutes in one session. This, along with the generous allocation of RAM, the relatively fast Athlon CPU and a really good warranty (giving you two years on-site cover and a third year return to base parts and labour) keep the Evesham Voyager 5500A in the running.

Evesham.com - Voyager 5500A price

£1,099.00 + VAT