HP 250 G6 15

Excellent laptop requires heavy lifting

Remember when laptops were inch-thick four-pound plastic crates with clicky mouse buttons and bezels you could put a sticky note on? You will when you clap eyes on the HP 250 G6, a PC so plain it almost makes its name look interesting. It’s as portable as anything 15 inches wide that weighs the same as a large bag of sugar, and in this configuration it has a decent mid-range Intel i5 processor, 8GB of memory and a 256GB SSD. Yet it leaves you enough change from £600 for a bag to haul it around in.

This is the kind of computer they don’t make any more. Give or take a bit of flex in the lid, it’s solidly put together, and none of the bulk goes to waste. Along with the full-size screen is a full-size keyboard, complete with number keys, and although the touchpad isn’t the biggest it works fine, with the bonus of real buttons that you know you’ve pressed. On the right-hand side is a DVD writer drive – remember those? – plus an SD card reader and a USB 2.0 port for a mouse. Two fast USB 3.1 ports on the left-hand side are accompanied by VGA and HDMI ports for monitors ancient and modern, a Gigabit Ethernet socket, and a large grille, which lets the fan keep the processor alive, while drying the hair of anyone sitting to your left. The i5 can’t match the latest eighthgeneration quad- core i5s, nor even its seventh-generation desktop PC counterparts, but this plucky processor is quick enough for most Windows 10 tasks, especially as it’s paired with an SSD rather than a clunky hard drive. The trade-off is that you won’t have room for a big photo, video or music collection, but the SD slot is one answer to that, and compact USB sticks another. Our video-playback test took nearly seven hours to run the battery down, and unlike many it’s easy to replace when it gets old and loses capacity. A 15.6in screen needs plenty of pixels to do it justice, and HP’S done it proud with Full HD resolution. The catch is that it doesn’t go very bright and covers less than 54 per cent of the SRGB colour range (not good for photo editing). In general use, though, we could put up with it, and the icing on the cake is that you get Windows 10 Pro, with its extra options and encryption. For the money, we really couldn’t ask much more.

Takes some lugging around, but has all the ports you need, a DVD drive and Full HD