There's substance beneath the hood of this fully-featured, stylish laptop. Plus, it’s the cheapest lamborgini you can buy.

A decent multimedia notebook, but it’s not exciting enough for the price.

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

An impressive attempt at a good-value portable PC, but the ergonomics let it down.

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

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

The original performance laptops now come with enough graphical might to challenge current performance desktops.

Not perfect, but the best all-rounder.

Toshiba won this month's cat walk competition.

Apple’s 17-inch PowerBook G4 is a thing of beauty, shaming the other 17- inch notebooks with its size, weight and design – perhaps with the exception of the ASUS.

The Toshiba Satellite P30 is a 17-inch behemoth with a price tag to match.

The Samsung M40 plus is a slick and stylish notebook, but unfortunately just doesn’t cut it compared to the others on test here.

Like the Pioneer, the Protac Excel D495 is another locally built giant – at this size we’re wading into desktop replacement territory.

You really have to look to the 17-inch giants like the HP Pavilion zd8001AP to find machines that were designed as multimedia beasts from the ground up.

We dubbed the ASUS ‘The Black Box’ because, like its aeronautical namesake, it records everything.

The Pioneer DreamBook Power 900 is a locally built monster – this isn’t a desktop replacement, it’s a desk.

The D900T has to be one the most impressively kitted out notebooks we've ever reviewed. Now, before you go running off with a fist full of readies, this notebook isn't available as such to the general public. Rather, resellers of Todaytech's notebooks can order them in whatever configuration you want. Or if you'd rather -- and we quite like this option -- you can order the notebook stripped of most options, and configure your own from spare parts or cheaper parts if you think you can do better on pricing.

If you're after an ultra portable, this isn't the notebook for you. If you're after a large form factored portable desktop replacement, this could be the ticket. This behemoth of a notebook features a 17-inch widescreen display and a footprint to match.

The notebook winner this month was a close call. Two units stood out as being at the top of the multimedia field: the Pioneer D47K and the Acer Aspire 1802WSM. Feature-by-feature they were very closely matched, but we chose the Pioneer for several reasons, one of which was its advanced media capabilities.

A capable desknote, its bulk might make you think twice about travelling with it, but it does secure itself as a reasonable performer on the desk.