We were looking for a new notebook and headed to Gibraltar to buy one.
After a couple of hours walking up and down Main Street checking out prices and specifications we decided to buy the Compaq Presario CQ50.

It comes with Windows Vista Home Edition.
A 200GB hard drive which comes partitioned for system recovery.
An AMD Turion Dual 64 Processor.
NVidia Motherboard/Sound/Graphics Card.
2 GB Ram.
Wifi ready.
A 5-in-1 card reader is built in too.
CD/DVD rewriter with LightScribe.

The RRP is £599 although they are widely available for £499.

We bought ours from Galaxy.
A big thank you to them for their excellent service and advice.

We got the notebook home and began the task of removing all the trial software which it comes with.
Norton - Office 2007 etc all 60 day trials.

This is the first computer we've had with Microsoft Vista.
I've read lots of reviews that it was bloated and slow.
A few laptops which were offered to us came with the option of downgrading to XP Professional. Vista seems unpopular.

First Impressions
I really like Vista. It looks good and seems fast enough not to annoy.
I think that 2GB Ram is probably essential to run Vista.
The laptop keyboard seems to be of a reasonable quality.
The touchpad is a bevel in a metal strip that runs the full width of the front of the laptop. Cool.

Problems to date
A "COM Surrogate" message kept appearing when I tried to launch video files.
Updating a few Codecs seems to have fixed this minor irritation.

Overall
Very happy, it does what I want and seems to be a decent build quality.