Advent Verona

The first wave of ULV laptops may have been overpriced for what was on offer, but now models are getting increasingly cheaper as the technology filters down through the manufacturer ranks.

The Advent Verona is the cheapest ULV (ultra low voltage) laptop we’ve seen so far — prices start at £330, which isn’t bad for a 13.3” laptop that weighs just 1.6kg and a similarly streamlined design as the MacBook Air (though at 33mm, it’s not quite as slim).

So, the Advent Verona looks like a tempting proposition if you want a lightweight laptop with a reasonably large screen, but don’t want to pay £463 for the similar Samsung X420. As with all cheap laptops though, it pays to look a little closer at the Verona before reaching for your credit card.

Cheap laptops usually look a bit naff, but Advent has been paying attention to the design of its low-cost offerings — as we saw with the Roma and Milano models — and it’s fair to say that the Verona doesn’t look like any corners have been cut. The all-plastic case feels solid and the glossy lid, with its contrasting light grey/dark grey swirls, is a nice touch.

There’s no catch to keep the Verona’s lid closed, but the screen sits on a pair of stiff hinges that allow it to fold back just far enough for comfortable lap-top use — as long as you’re not sitting in too cramped a seat, that is. The 13.3” screen has a glossy finish and 1366 x 768 resolution, and is both bright and clear, with wide horizontal viewing angles — visibility soon drops off if you look at it from too high or low an angle, though.

The Verona’s keyboard also looks like it’s more than up to scratch, with a standard layout and wide, flat keys that should suit all fingers. The keys have a bit too much travel and not enough feel or our liking, but such sentiments are usually subjective and you can, of course, try it out for yourself in a PC World store before buying. In fact some hands-on time is recommended, since our model had a keyboard that didn’t seem to be fitted properly — or at least we hope that other models don’t have 5mm of flex along their top edge…

The keyboard surround is made from the same shiny grey plastic as the lid and the trackpad is moulded into the middle of the wrist rest. As ever, this looks sleek and seamless, but the shiny finish makes for a rubbish mousing surface with fingertips that are anything less than bone dry.

There’s no room for an optical drive in the Verona — the case tapers from just a few millimetres at the front edge to 33mm at the rear, but there is the usual selection of ports.

ULV stands for Ultra Low Voltage, which refers to the low power consumption of this new generation of Intel mobile processors. Ultra-low voltage means low power consumption and, correspondingly, low heat output and that’s how these laptops mage to be so slim — the cool-running chips don’t need as much cooling.

Unfortunately, low power consumption still means that performance suffers compared to a standard voltage mobile processor, but this is seldom an issue as long as you’re not expecting to use a ULV laptop for processor intensive tasks like video editing or 3D rendering.

That said, the budget Intel Celeron 743 processor inside the Advent Verona is punier than most — it’s single-core, doesn’t support Hyper-Threading and runs at 1.2GHz. We reviewed the 1.3GHz model ( which costs £350) and even this started to slow down with Windows 7 and just a few foreground applications open. The experience was a bit like using an Intel Atom-powered netbook, which perhaps isn’t a bad comparison considering that some models cost about the same as the Verona.

In theory, the Intel GMA HD4500M graphics chipset should compensate for the weak Celeron 743 processor when it comes to video playback, but even this suffered on the Verona — high-definition YouTube videos were jerky, even when played full-screen. The imminent Adobe Flash 10.1 should help here (it uses onboard graphics for video streaming), but we doubt the improvements will be that dramatic.

Such an underpowered processor should at least translate to long battery life, but Advent has crippled the Verona in this regard by fitting a tiny 2200mAh battery. As a result, it ran for less than two hours in Battery Eater Pro’s Classic test and just over three in the Reader test.