Ok, we have a cross trainer rather than a treadmill, cos i have shocking knees and ankles, so i wanted something less impact, but i'll tell you what i looked for when buying it:

1) Good Quality, not the cheap junk. We ended up going with a York brand, we did buy it 2nd hand from trading post, but as it was one of the higher models, we were saving around 50% and it was only a few months old. We went there and tried it out before buying it. We also foudn out that York has a place when you can get it repaired about an hour from us if we needed to.

2) consol display - this was really important to us.

I wanted one where you could set different times and programs (fat burning, cardio etc), because i found tht if it automatically changed the resistance for me i would cope with it, but i probably would have just stayed on the bottom one if i was controlling it.

I also found the little bar graph display really good for keeping me going, i knew i only had 1 or 2 more lines to get through and i found it really motivating to finish it right to the end of the set time, rather than thinking "this is so hard i need a break". Instead i would say "just one more line, one more line".

It also tells you how far you have gone and Cal burned, along with monitoring your HR, so you cna try and have it in the optimal zone for exercise. Also when i was preg it was great, i could still exercise and keep my HR below 140 to be safe to the baby.

We love having it here - you just just jump on for 25 mins, and then have a shower etc when the kids are down... so my easier then all the time it takes to go to gyn, get changed, exercise, get re changed, come home, have a shower etc.