A good first stab at the semi-ruggedised laptop market. It isn’t up to the tough standards of others, though.

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

Despite some welcome additions and good components, this Acer notebook is left wanting.

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

Very powerful and, with few features missing, it’s good value at the price.

A powerful and feature-packed notebook. But it can’t match the quality of Dell’s XPS M1710.

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

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

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

It’s one of the thinnest laptops available and it looks stunning, with an industry first up its sleeve.

Not perfect, but the best all-rounder.

The branding reflects the exclusivity, but not necessarily the capability.

A solid but unremarkable notebook offering a good set of features and excellent warranty.

The Inspiron 630m is Dell’s first 14-inch widescreen notebook.

A rock-solid and fully kitted-out laptop for the demanding worker.

Not all multimedia notebooks have to weigh in around the $5000 mark. Digital Star’s 15.4in widescreen PowerNote Z71V offers very good value for money for a laptop sporting a 2GHz Pentium M, 1GB of RAM and a 128MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 6600 graphics chip.

The 9300 is reminiscent of its predecessor, the Inspiron 9100, which was pitched squarely at power users and gamers looking for plenty of grunt. This product refresh takes it one step further by using a mobile processor rather than the desktop CPU found in the 9100.

For such a high specification machine with a large display, we didn’t have high expectations of battery life. We were wrong. Not only is this one of the best looking and functional notebooks we’ve played with in some time, but this notebook managed to stay operating at full load with a looping productivity test for well over three and a half hours – enough for students, road warriors and home users.

The Civic Diamond 2015.xT is more than a little similar to Digital Star's PowerNote CL56 (reviewed November 2004, page 43), featuring the same OEM housing. Designed to take care of any application you can throw at it, it's a capable book that will handle DirectX 8 and 9 games, as well as churn through productivity apps.

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.