This is an unusual kind of product review, mainly because it’s for something you can’t buy! This is the official product info, and yes, I did buy it from Aldi, mainly as they offer a 3 year warranty on most electricals.
This is my personal laptop, and has been for four and a half years. That bit is important, because it’s what inspired me to write this review. I’ve just watched a 1hr45m film on my 17″ screen. From DVD, using the four and a half year old original battery. It still showed 19% charge remaining. Frankly I find that incredible! I use this machine an awful lot, all the website work I do is done on it, and I often pull bits of it apart to connect parts from other machines for testing.
It wasn’t a super cheap machine, but was very good value. It cost me £500 when new, but for that you got a mobile Core i3 processor (back when they were still very new), along with 3GB DDR3 RAM (ditto), along with 17.3″ LED 1600×900 screen and a USB DVB-T TV tuner. It also has a spare SATA hard drive bay, which for somebody like me who does a lot of data recovery from broken laptops, is an extremely useful feature.
I’ve replaced the standard DVD-RW drive with a Blu-Ray writer, as I’m a film geek, and watch a lot of movies when I’m away from home. I also replaced the standard 32bit Windows 7 installation for 64bit, mainly so I can add extra RAM if I feel the need. To be honest I haven’t yet, because this thing still feels perfectly quick enough in day to day use.
It is quite a big and heavy laptop, mostly due to the big screen, but that doesn’t bother me at all, especially as it means the keyboard is generously sized, and has a proper numerical keypad. There is also plenty of room for ports, with 3xUSB, E-Sata, Display Port AND HDMI, as well as ethernet, ExpressCard and a memory card reader, on top of the proper optical drive and dual HD capability.
I would definitely have no hesitation in buying another Medion laptop. In fact I did just that when asked by my mother-in-law to get her a new computer. In a way I want to have a reason to get a new one, because new toys are always fun, but at the same time I’m very happy with this one.
