From budget laptops to ultra-tiny netbooks, ultraportables and high performance, we explain the tricks to finding out the ultimate laptop at the right price.

Can’t decide between an Eee and a Wind? A Mini note or an Aspire One? Believe it or not, there’s a bunch of old school smaller laptops that may do the job for less money. We took a look at 7 old school ultraportables.

It looks the Asus Eee Box isn’t the only interesting mini-desktop around. Amid the swathes of Centrino 2 and small form factor notebooks at IDF this week, we spotted this – a mini Centrino 2 desktop.

A fantastic specification notebook with all the trimmings you'd expect to find on more expensive notebooks, the Joybook 8100-V13 has a 15.4in widescreen WXGA with native 1280 x 800 resolution. With ATI's Mobility RADEON 9600 graphics, boasting 64MB dedicated video memory, it's great for DVD playback or gaming -- the unit returned 9,502 marks under 3DMark01SE Pro, more than enough to provide comfortable gameplay with a decent number of fps even in recent games. BenQ has gone as far as to include not just a DVD-ROM for DVD movie playback, but an optical DVD writer, capable of 2-speed DVD+R media writing, ideal for both business archiving or for personal backup.

Buying a mid-range Dell notebook now means a choice between Dell's Inspiron, Studio and XPS notebooks. We examine the value.

Despite some odd feature choices, this is an affordable powerhouse of a laptop. A great value mid-range Centrino 2 laptop, as long as you're not worried about battery life.

Absolutely jam packed with features, this notebook isn't your run-of-the-mill basic-function productivity laptop. At every turn we found hardware above and beyond the call of duty including a 64MB FX5200 graphics card, sexy widescreen display, 80GB hard disk drive and DVD-RAM/DVD-R/RW slot mounted drive for all your backup and home movie-making needs. A hybrid somewhere between legacy continuation and dismissal, this notebook features three rear-mounted USB 2.0 ports and parallel connectivity.

Although the mobile marketplace has been changing in the face of Centrino and the slow but gradual tablet PC adoption rate, large form factored (greater than single spindle) notebooks are still the order of the day.

This is no ordinary notebook, sporting Intel’s 1.6GHz Centrino processor with a 1MB on-die L2 cache, 400MHz frontside bus and a half gig of DDR. It’s nothing short of impressively fast.

Powered by an Intel Pentium-M 1.6GHz, the Modtech Civic Diamond 1600W Centrino notebook has a decent core specification, including a useful 512MB DDR RAM, 40GB of disk space and an ATI Mobility RADEON 9000 card offering 64MB of non-shared memory.

What will you be buying, using and drooling over this year? Tim Dean looks at the astounding products and technologies due to hit in the next 12 months.

Acer’s tiny new Tablet PC, the TravelMate C111 marries the functionality of their previous convertible tablet with the low-power high-performance functionality of the Intel Centrino.

Looking quite a lot like what I imagined the son of Apple's Titanium and Powerbook lines of notebooks would turn out, the AStone notebook features both the Titanium's solid matte silver magnesium-alloy body with the Powerbook's white limned styling. From the very outset this makes the AStone one visually appealing notebook.

It's the return of the twin graphics chip powered laptop, but this time Core2 Duo power is under the hood.

Wrapped in an attractive silver chassis, this sexy looking notebook is easy on the eye, and features all of the latest gadgets. The left-hand side of the machine features the usual legacy parallel and DB9 monitor out for use with an external monitor, although both are hidden beneath a rubber cover so as not to ruin the smooth clean lines of this housing.

We've put both mini-notebooks through their paces, and while Linux fans may disagree, the winner is clear.

William Maher wonders if expensive notebooks are really that much better than the $499 EeePC.

Speed up your home network with these wireless routers, including faster speeds, better gaming and VoIP handling and automatic security.

This rather small Centrino-powered notebook from Fujitsu has been designed for students and the hip-crowd; those that want something that's capable of work and entertainment, is not too large or heavy to carry, and that can easily balance on a café table between text books and a hot latte.