Laptop:

[Tellos Athenaios]

It's a weird combination:

For a laptop the screen is big (if you want to carry it around with you this is not a good thing -- not because screens consume more power than just about any other component, and not because it's big and heavy and clunky). The resolution is simply *odd*. Yeah I know it's fashionable these days to use 16:9; but come on: 1680x945? Claims about HD content aside: you aren't going to get more than 720p; which as you might imagine involves a vertical resolution of 720 pixels (lines). The next HD mode is 1080i/1080p which is well beyond your monitor. So you can expect some pretty large black bars if you do want to use the laptop for video playback.

The hard disk is kind of standard I expect, perhaps a touch towards the higher end. Without make & model there isn't anything much to say about it.

The processor is not much to write home about: Pentium processors are kind of slow-ish especially by modern standards (it's basically 2 generations old technology; we've seen the Core2Duo and now the Core-i's as well). It wouldn't be so bad if it was a Core2Duo @1.8Ghz; or something (comparable performance at lower temperature and power draw). Equally if you were looking for portability, a Pentium dual core @1.5Ghz would definitely feel nicer on your lap...

The amount of memory is kind of misleading (oh it probably will be ~4GB but your Windows 7 features a 32bit not-PAE-enabled kernel eh?).

And the graphics card is another odd choice. Especially in combination with the RAM. (1GB + 4GB - 3.5GB = 1.5GB of spare unaddressable memory.) You'd do better with the HD 4530 (a 512MB DDR2 card) on a laptop ...

The real problem for you, arguably, is that applications such a photoshop do not (directly) leverage any graphics card much. To top it off, for it to run Vista+1 you are looking at a fairly heavy load already... So you have a graphics card which is a bit overkill; a monitor that is out to lunch, a CPU that can't keep up, and memory you can't use. All for €700,- though.

On the other hand €700,- is kind of budget anyways. Good Core2Duo stuff _starts_ there if you are lucky but the combination of interesting CPU & GPU with a bit of RAM and decent networking gets you a notch under €1000,- fast.