A good-looking, ergonomically excellent laptop with a wealth of multimedia capabilities for home users.

When it comes to notebooks, there are a few different flavours with their own specialties.  The trick to purchasing the right notebook is to know your needs and the intended purposes of the unit so you can properly match the correct machine with your requirements.

Great for executives on the move thanks to size and decent battery life, but the missing optical drive disappoints

Small but perfectly formed, the D420 has hours of battery life and loads of features and great ergonomics.

A good laptop for business, with superb design touches but some unfortunate omissions.

Great for executives on the move thanks to size and decent battery life, but the missing optical drive disappoints.

A good, basic notebook that’s specifically designed with the accident-prone user in mind.

A startling achievement: a highly capable mini-laptop for under $700. Only mediocre battery life mars its appeal.

Sony does it again with a Notebook to die for.

While the epithet 'multimedia PC' used to be bandied about to over-hype any PC in the mid-'90's that was capable of playing music, rudimentary video, and games, the descriptive was overused so much on sub-par PCs that the impact of any real multimedia capabilities was diminished in the wash of pretenders.

Dell's 6400 is a great value mid-range notebook with very few weaknesses. The support is the icing on the cake.

Fast, well built and superbly featured - our business laptop of choice.

A flexible and powerful livingroom PC that ticks almost all the right boxes, as well as being great value.

The two-and-a-half thousand dollar price point is a popular one for PC systems.

With only Dell's disappointing Inspiron Mini 12 so far released, Samsung doesn't have a great deal of competition at this size. The NC20 has six-hour battery life, fine performance and a superb display

Luxurious extras and design make this a highly desirable machine. It’s ideal if space is at a premium at home.

Toshiba’s R100 redefined what it meant to be an ultra-portable laptop.

A couple of nifty gimmicks and an extended warranty help give this netbook the boost that its ergonomics don’t.

Solidly built and packed with features, HP's flagship nx9420 is a very good notebook.

The Qosmio is the absolute pinnacle in multimedia notebooks. It brings everything you need for a good Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) system and squeezes it into a notebook form-factor. Albeit a large notebook form-factor. Yes the Qosmio is a huge and heavy notebook, but it's not nearly as heavy as it would have been if it was packed with desktop internals as many desknotes of this size usually are.