The sub-£500 notebook segment of the market is becoming a real battlefield, with lots of vendors vying with each offer to offer the best deal on price and features. The real winners are the customers, as what we get for our money these days would have cost twice as much only a year or 18 months ago.

Entering this fray is the Notino W5600 from Hi-Grade, powered by an Intel CPU with a large hard drive, half a gigabyte of memory, a 15.4-inch widescreen display and even a multi-format DVD burner.

It's not what you would call stylish, being quite a hefty 2.9kg in weight with a black chassis and silver lid finish, but at this price who cares about style? It's a nice clean chassis with the left-hand side holding just a single USB 2.0 port, two audio ports and an Express Card slot, a surprise at this price. While Express cards are thin on the ground at the moment, this does give the W5600 a degree of future-proofing.

The right-hand side of the chassis just holds the optical drive, with the rest of the ports being on the rear panel; modem, LAN, three USB 2.0 and a VGA port to connect the W5600 to an external monitor.

Powering the Notino W5600 is an Intel Celeron-M 410 clocked at 1.5GHz and backed by 512MB of DDR2 memory: don't expect blood-curdling performance, but it should perform all the basics well enough, if not exceptionally quickly. The memory is expandable up to 2GB through two DIMM slots.

Unusually, the chipset is Intel but a VIA product - the VIA P4M890 - which in this case uses the VIA 8237A Southbridge, but this chipset also provides the W5600's Achilles heel, namely the integrated graphics.

While we are used to integrated graphics not supplying much in the way of games play, the integrated VIA S3G UniChrome Pro lacks the 3D hardware support of Intel's integrated graphics, to such an extreme that the system wouldn't even run 3DMark05 because of a lack of hardware support, and needless to say it wouldn't touch FarCry.

On the plus side, the WXGA widescreen display is fine, with a natural resolution of 1,280 x 800 pixels - ideal for watching DVD movies on.

While Hi-Grade has scrimped on some of the features of the Notino W5600, it's nice to see that when it comes to storage and backup, no expense has been spared. Permanent storage is provided by a Fujitsu 100GB hard drive, while a nice surprise at this price point is the inclusion of a DVD burner so you can off-load files and perform back-ups easily enough.

The keyboard is good enough and doesn't have too much flex in it, while the track pad is responsive without being too sensitive. Above the keyboard, next to the power button, are three quick-launch buttons which start your mail client and your Web browser, while the third is customisable. Next to these are six warning lights for power, battery level, etc.

A basic, no frills notebook, the W5600 is an ideal entry level machine. Apart from the integrated graphics, which are poor even by integrated graphics standards, Hi-Grade's Notino W5600 gives an idea of just how much notebook you can get for so little money these days.