A laptop of luxury, but practicality suffers and you pay a hefty premium.

A notebook fortress to equip your workforce with confidence, but sub-par performance.

Good features, good quality and good value - it’s also the fastest ultraportable we’ve seen.

Chunky, powerful and intimidating. Everything you want in a PC, but not what you'd want in a media centre.

We heard that Apple may be changing its slogan from “Think Different” to “CONFORM!”

Great looks, a good software bundle and hardware that almost completes the package.

Small, powerful and relatively cheap. This baby notebook is an ideal travel companion.

Small but packed with features, this Lifebook is a stunner.

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

While many ultraportable laptops, like the Toshiba R200 go all out to get size and weight to an absolute minimum, a great deal of usability is often sacrificed – the X505 is impractically small for constant daily usage while the R200 has limited battery sizes.

The Acer Aspire 1692 WLMi is a story of compromises; a +/-/RAM dual layer burner and gigabit Ethernet are offset by Windows XP Home, only 512MB of RAM and the slowest processor and hard disk of the bunch.

Stylish and packed with features, it is not the cheapest 12 inch notebook available. This said, if you simply must have the features on offer inside this 'book, then this notebook does it all with style.

Widescreen is still one of the flavours of the month for notebooks and plenty of users are opting to banish boring old 4:3 aspect ratio LCD panels to the land of wind and ghosts.

The Acer has all the bells and whistles you're going to need as a student, or mobile office worker; and then some.

Powerful laptops have to be big, bulky and ugly, right? Not necessarily. Samsung's new line of laptops is proving that portability, style and performance are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

The look of the HP Compaq NC6000_106 is pure business with its black casing and silver trim. It's also one of the heavier laptops at 2.9kg.

The Portege A200 also has many of the necessary features we would expect in an education notebook, including LAN and modem ports, two USB ports, a DVD-ROM, and 802.11b/g with an wireless on/off switch.

A decent PC with media abilities bolted on, transforming this into a good lounge machine.

Sony typically asks a little more than their competitors for similar products, but this usually pays off in the quality of workmanship and the reliability associated with most Sony products. The Sony VAIO VGN-S28GP is an extremely well-built notebook and should provide rock-solid performance for years to come.

Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) 2005 was launched with quite a bit of fanfare late last year, and not least of all because it was the first time in its 18 month life Australians could buy systems based on the OS.