Low, otherwise known as 'lowestonweb.com', is a division of Evesham Technology with the simple remit of selling kit at the lowest price available, at least in the UK. Its first venture into notebooks is the Quest Explorer S26, and its asking price is £100 cheaper than, for example, Dell's cheapest, standard notebook. It's certainly the lowest for this particular model; an easy feat, as it's only available from this one site. Although it's an Evesham machine, it's not available from Evesham itself.

This isn't a heavily cut-down notebook. It includes most of what you'd expect in a modern laptop, from a 15-inch LCD display to a 40GB hard drive and a DVD/CD-RW combo drive.

The Quest Explorer S26 is based on an AMD Sempron 2600+ processor, running at 1.83GHz, with 256MB of memory, of which 64MB is taken by the VIA/S3G UniChrome Pro graphics chipset. This is a realistic specification for an entry-level notebook and running mainstream applications like Works or Office won't cause it any stress.

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Around the machine's edges are three USB ports, a Type II PC Card slot and a memory card slot for SecureDigital, MultiMedia and MemoryStick cards, with an irritating, untethered rubber plug which is almost certain to go missing immediately. At the front are jacks for headphones, microphone and line in. These would be better positioned at the side, where the plugs won't stick into you when you're using the Quest Explorer on your lap.

At the back are modem and 10/100Mbps Ethernet sockets for easy connection to the Internet or a local network, but as you'd expect in a machine at this price, there's no wireless networking built in. You do get single serial, parallel and external monitor sockets, though, and an external keyboard and mouse port.

The keyboard has a light, quiet action and a conventional layout for a notebook. The cursor key cluster is dropped forward of the main QWERTY pad, making it easier to use.

The PCMark 2004 benchmark produced an index of 2,451, which is a respectable result for a notebook in this class. Comparing it with other machines with similar processors and chipsets showed it well up the field. Running the MobileMark battery test produced a battery life figure of 187 minutes which, at over three hours, is a feather in the cap of the Sempron processor and its VIA chipset. Lack of performance certainly can't explain the Quest Explorer S26's low price.

So often, products offered at 'too good to be true' prices are just that. The Quest Explorer S26 isn't. It's a solid, well-configured mobile PC, capable of running day-to-day applications without a hiccup and providing outstanding value for money. All it needs for true versatility is a wireless network card and a tether for its memory card plug.