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

Fantastic design and highly-configurable power make this XPS useful, desirable and good value.

Very fast for some applications, but poor gaming performance and strong competition reduces its appeal.

Dell’s new Inspirons are more about colour and value than performance and excitement.

Dell’s first foray into using AMD processors is a modest performer, but fair value.

Not great value for money, but the XPS 700 offers plenty of power and striking looks.

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

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

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

Whisper quiet, well built and well designed, but a lack of power and expandability will keep enthusiasts away.

World's Fastest Notebook.

Not perfect, but the best all-rounder.

Seriously powerful mobile gaming grunt with all the bling, from Dell. Yep, Dell.

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

The Dell Inspiron 6000 walks into this roundup with a serious disadvantage – packing only an Intel P-M 1.86GHz and an ATI Mobility RADEON X300 it is easily outgunned by the competition.

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.

Dell's reputation at providing reasonably priced capable 'books shines through in the 510M - the cheapest notebook on test this month.

Slightly less sturdy than previous Dell models we have seen, the D500 is finished in attractive silver bezel housing, the keyboard is comfortable to use and offers all the functionality of standard-sized desktop keyboards.

Managing a very respectable battery life of four and a half hours during a full productivity workload, Dell's Inspiron scored around middle of the pack under PCMark04 but failed to deliver in 3D, bringing up the rear in third last place.

Despite not being the smallest or lightest notebook, this veritable speed demon packs a 3.06GHz desktop Pentium 4 processor and is matched with an ATI Mobility 9000 graphics adaptor and quarter gig of PC2100 DDR RAM. Another notebook to dispose of legacy parallel, PS/2 and serial ports, it boasts a pair of rear mounted USB ports, S-Video output and FireWire connectivity. Also included are 10/100 Ethernet, a 56K modem and single PCMCIA slot for card expansion.