Acer’s Aspire one makes a splash. A great keyboard, a fine screen and a keen price make for a superb mini-laptop

Great ergonomics are let down by a few mediocre components and limited portability. But some features will tempt many.

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

Amazingly good value for what you get: a fully-featured, dual-core, ergonomic notebook.

It’s great value and will tempt some people thanks to its size and multimedia abilities.

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

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

A well priced portable that doesn't skimp on features, and packs a suprisingly powerful punch.

A cool, quiet and capable mini-PC that should agree with your budget.

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 $1000 PC was once regarded as the Holy Grail of computing, but now almost every manufacturer has one.

Producing a PC for under a thousand dollars will inevitably lead to compromises – do you go for a better screen or more processing power?

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 Aspire has a lot of handy multimedia functions that help it work as a desktop replacement/media unit. One of the Aspire’s main selling points is the Arcade feature, which is a Windows Media Centre clone. A button on the notebook fascia opens Arcade, bypassing the Windows OS and enabling all media player functions: DVD, MP3 etc. It works quite well but isn’t as graphically stunning as MCE.

On opening the box you can tell the Altron MM10 is a serious piece of equipment. It's a large, brushed-aluminium box with a distinctive neon-blue sound level meter on the front.

Punch Technology's Punch Biz+ system features a 2.8GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor, half gigabyte of PC3200 DDR-SDRAM, 52-speed CD-RW and a 17in monitor for under $2000 -- impressive pricing for this sort of spec machine.