Advent Centurion, Firefly and Verona: Stocking thrillers

On the -29th day of Christmas, Advent gave to we, a laptop and two ultra-cheap PCs. Sorry, that neither rhymes nor makes sense, but it is true: the high-street retailer's just unveiled the Centurion gaming desktop, the Firefly budget home PC, and the lightweight Verona laptop.

The Verona, according to Advent, is designed with mobility in mind. It's the proud owner of a 13-inch display, 2GB of RAM, a 250GB hard drive and a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. If we were in its shoes, we'd be rather less proud of the anaemic Intel Celeron 743 processor. It's the Usain Bolt of laptop processors -- if Usain Bolt gained 15 stone and a bad case of gout.

The Centurion is better equipped. It's pimped out with a Core 2 Quad Q8300 CPU, a very generous 1TB hard drive, 6GB of RAM and a gaming-capable Nvidia GeForce GT230 graphics card -- all for a totally reasonable £799. If that's too rich for your Christmas blood, there's always the Advent Firefly, which has a slightly more sedate Intel Pentium E5300 dual-core chip, 2GB of RAM, 320GB of disk space, built-in Wi-Fi and Windows 7 Home Premium -- all for £379.

All three will be available from PC World, Currys and Dixons very shortly.