We're doing our best to champion Australia's home grown White Box market.

Like the Pioneer, the Protac Excel D495 is another locally built giant – at this size we’re wading into desktop replacement territory.

The Excel G736 notebook from Protac is a desktop replacement, and as well as better-than-normal notebook specifications it also comes with the other traditional trapping of a desktop replacement notebook: it's big, it's chunky, and it's heavy.

Looks cheap but performs very well. At this price it’s a steal.

Built around the same notebook housing as the Emagen Zephyra XT, this attractive high shine lid is one of the better looking notebook covers we've seen, making this product appear out of its price range.

The i-Buddie’s biggest claim to fame in the notebook stakes is that it keeps its travel weight down by eschewing an in-built battery. The reasoning is that most notebooks are either used at home or the office, where they’re plugged into the mains, but aren’t powered up on the road much.

With a price tag this low, the Polyview had a great advantage before undergoing our tests.

LCDs are finally hitting the sweet spot for price and quality, which means we can all safely cast aside our CRTs.

If you're after an ultra portable, this isn't the notebook for you. If you're after a large form factored portable desktop replacement, this could be the ticket. This behemoth of a notebook features a 17-inch widescreen display and a footprint to match.

The Web Excel PT-3830 is an 802.11b wireless access point, four-port switch and DSL router all-in-one. It's a good package if you want to share your DSL modem with a small network, but everything about the PT-3830 is definitely no-frills. Closer examination, however, reveals a highly configurable device.

Another PCI device to come supplied with a detachable antenna, it can be adjusted into one of three locking positions: parallel to the backplane, 45 degrees away from the card, or perpendicular to the backplane.

Reasonably priced for a $99 dual-band wireless 802.11b/g PCMCIA, it's physically identical in size to the Level OneWPC-0300 device.

At the very reasonable price of $157, ECS's L4IPEA2 is a great little board.

After last month's massive TFT Labs it became apparent that the old 'caveat emptor' is alive and kicking. You're not always going to get what you pay for – but on rare occasions, you get a lot more, as is the case with the Polyview CMV 1515 display. Stylish and bursting at the gills with features, this monitor deserves to make a significant impact on the LCD market. It's impressive specs include a 15ms pixel response time, which is undoubtedly the fastest we've seen.

The Ricoh MP5120 justifies the many years of press releases and delays that led to critics forming a prematurely negative impression of the emerging DVD+RW writing standard.

We did a double take this month. Not only are Pioneer and Protac's chassis identical but the inside specs are too.

This is not the first 'desknote' that we've reviewed (see Protac DeskNote, June 2002, page 37) but in our estimation the Aspire 1703SC is the first system that truly expounds the virtues of true desknote-ism.

Although heavily kitted out with an ATI Mobility RADEON 9700 featuring 128MB of dedicated video memory, 1.5GHz Pentium M and half a gigabyte of PC2700 DDR, the Zephyra XT finished in the lower half for overall placement.

Coming in under our stringent pricing scheme, ASUS bettered it by $50 and managed to include some great hardware and features unavailable in some of the more expensive units.

Taking first place overall, the MegaBook M510C had a bit of a mixed run to the final score tally, managing only fifth place in PCMark04 then unanimously taking out first place with a score nearly breaking 10,000 3DMarks, impressive for a notebook, let alone one under $2500.