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.

Toshiba’s resident portable computer visionary speaks about hardware design, Vista, and the future of notebook tech.

A super-light laptop with great battery life, but the screen is both its stand-out feature and, for some, its Achilles heel

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.

On receiving this unit, we were impressed by the mammoth 15.4in widescreen display. Although sceptical of its ability to perform given its monster display size, we were proven wrong at every turn, with the 8600 performing similarly to the more expensive Toshiba Tecra S1 Notebook (July 2003 page 40). Absolutely bursting at the gills with features, this Notebook boasts an array of connectivity options including side mounted FireWire and IrDA, while on the rear of the unit we find two USB and legacy serial, parallel and S-Video ports.

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.

When we ran four tablet PCs in December 2002 (Issue 61, page 36) we got plenty of response from readers looking to find out more about them. Over a year on now and tablets have increased dramatically in spec and design although pricing hasn’t reduced as much as we’d expected - possibly since they still haven’t made mass market appeal and sales.

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.

They’re faster than hard drives, and save battery life, but do they last? Intel says yes, and has 80GB and 160GB SSDs on the way.

The bad news is that Sony says these sexy 11.1in Vaio TZ laptops are at risk of overheating. But there is something about Sony's Vaio laptops that should make you happy.

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.

It’s not the most powerful, but its games performance and features help the Toshiba A350 stand out in the price bracket for mid-price laptops

The first Dothan notebook to roll off the rank, we were interested to see exactly how much real-world gain Intel is offering in its revised Centrino platform.

The ASUS is one tough little cookie. Its cover and palmrest are encased in brushed aluminium lending the unit a reassuring sense of rigidity and roadworthiness. The 15.4" screen is bright, and its default resolution of 1680x1050 makes text sharp but a little small to read unless up close. The unit also comes with a built in TV-tuner, and also sports a TV-antenna output.