Customers who sign up to a two-year broadband connection with Orange through PC World, or with AOL through Carphone Warehouse, are to be given a free notebook PC.

PC World is giving customers a notebook worth £300 when they sign up to Orange’s starter broadband package which costs £14.99 per month (with the first three months half price – £7.49). It gives customers up to 2Mbit/sec download speeds, a download limit of 2GB and a free wired ADSL router.

The PCs have a 15.4in widescreen display and are wireless enabled. They also have 256MB of memory, a 40GB hard drive and a DVD rewriter. PC World has said customers can upgrade to a higher-specified laptop from £19.99.

Carphone Warehouse, which will be starting its promotion from next month, is giving away a Dell notebook worth £500 for people signing up to its £19.99 AOL broadband service. For this, customers get download speed of up to 8Mbit/sec, a download limit of 40GB and a free wireless router with preinstalled wireless security.

The wireless-enabled PCs come with Vista Home Basic, an 80GB hard drive, 1GB of memory and a 15.4in widescreen display.

However, the benefits of both deals have been questioned by price and service comparison site Broadband Choices, which suggested they are a 'trap'.

Michael Phillips, product director of Broadband Choices, said: “I would always caution people against committing to long contracts and at 24 months, this one is a real mammoth.

"Consumers need to consider the faster speeds and better value packages that they will undoubtedly miss out on in the coming two years.”

He advised customers who still wanted to go for one of these deals to plump for the Carphone Warehouse and AOL deal as the notebooks being offered had “better features” compared to the PC World one, which had a “low specification and was already out of date.”

He also said that the broadband package offered by AOL was better because it was faster and had a higher monthly download allowance.

The company also took a pop at Orange, saying the ISP "consistently performed badly in customer polls and surveys", such as the recent Which? Broadband Satisfaction Survey.

“Consumers need to think about issues like customer service and reliability,” added Phillips.