Sixteen notebooks under $2500, we've separated the winners with the goods from the less impressive performers.

The notebooks were subjected to several benchmarks to give an objective evaluation of their speeds, performance and applicability.

How much notebook will $2500 actually buy you? The PC Authority Labs team investigates.

Toshiba has been a long running leader in the notebook field, so its always interesting to see what it has to offer, if only to see what is the current state of play in the market place. Toshiba responded to the call for desktop replacement notebooks by submitting the Satellite Pro 4360 model, a heavy machine tipping the scales at 3.17kg and clad in the familiar Toshiba dark grey.

The Portege 3110CT is one of the latest in Toshiba's line of notebooks and continues the tradition of portability established with the first in its line.

Toshiba’s resident portable computer visionary speaks about hardware design, Vista, and the future of notebook tech.

This month the Labs team cast a critical eye over the latest Intel Pentium 4-based desktop replacement notebooks. Traditionally, desktop replacement means fully-featured, premium notebooks with

Looking for a new notebook for work or study? We’ve got it covered with 11 notebooks designed specifically for when playtime is over.

ACER TravelMate 630

There is a full keyboard with a trackpoint as the built-in pointing device and a generous palm rest.

Fastest Notebook

Designed to sit between the low-end Inspiron and high-end XPS families, it comes in 15in and 17in flavours and its target audience could be pretty much anyone: few laptops are as customisable as this.

Intel has been banging on about Centrino 2 lately, so it was good to finally get a chance to test the claims courtesy of a spanking new mid-range Centrino 2 M51 Va courtesy of ASUS.

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.

While the $2500 price ceiling means you're usually picking up larger form factored notebooks with an average 15in display, some manufacturers like Apple and Twinhead have put together smaller ultra portable 12 inch models for those who value size over all else.

A fantastic specification notebook with all the trimmings you'd expect to find on more expensive notebooks, the Joybook 8100-V13 has a 15.4in widescreen WXGA with native 1280 x 800 resolution. With ATI's Mobility RADEON 9600 graphics, boasting 64MB dedicated video memory, it's great for DVD playback or gaming -- the unit returned 9,502 marks under 3DMark01SE Pro, more than enough to provide comfortable gameplay with a decent number of fps even in recent games. BenQ has gone as far as to include not just a DVD-ROM for DVD movie playback, but an optical DVD writer, capable of 2-speed DVD+R media writing, ideal for both business archiving or for personal backup.

Toshiba don't often venture into lower price point notebooks, so we were quite impressed to receive a system from them under $2500, let alone a desktop Pentium 4 3GHz processor, DVD burner and 64MB ATI RADEON 9000 IGP graphics.

Powered by a 1.6GHz mobile Pentium processor, featuring dual-band 802.11a/g wireless capability and sporting a 15.4in wide-screen display, the Dell D800 represents the best of the Latitude series of notebooks. At around 3.3kg, it is not light, nor is it thin – but is complemented by an exceptional finish and a solid set of technology.

When it comes to design principles, the IBM embodies a completely different approach to the Toshiba