It’s not cheap, but it’s powerful and cleverly constructed to make the most of the components.

A Blu-ray drive is just about the only justification for the Sony’s high price; it’s poor value overall.

It’s the most expensive laptop we’ve looked at yet. David Hollingworth ponders if you get the right amount of bang for your buck.

A Blu-ray drive is just about the only justification for the Sony’s high price; it’s poor value overall.

A stunning way to enjoy HD DVD, but the wonderful design and features come at a price

The format wars continue as Blu Ray comes to a monster laptop at a monster price.

It might lack style and cutting edge technology, but this 19" monster packs in power and features.

World's Fastest Notebook.

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

Pioneer’s new DreamBook Power uses the Clevo D900K chassis which offers the size and space required to cool the blisteringly fast components contained within (see the specs box below).

Any way you look at it, ITC’s Millennia 7350 is a monster.

Very narrowly pipped for the top placing Labs winner award this month, Plus offers an impressive performing gaming machine with all the bells and whistles you'd expect to find at this price point. Wrapped in the attractive Cooler Master Cavalier wave housing, there's no ultra portability to be found here. The clear advantage of moving away from small form factor housing is not being starved for space internally.

When we sent out the call for multimedia systems we were expecting notebooks and PCs capable of DVD playback and some basic gaming. Pioneer not only cleared this bar with their submission - they raised it.

The Athlon64 has only been out a short while, and although it's an excellent processor, from all accounts it's not selling as well as it should be.

We find this model hovering in the no-man's-land between desktop replacement and notebook. Its large form factor and huge screen come at the expense of weight, while the wireless and large battery do make it viable for users on the move.

This is no ordinary notebook, sporting Intel’s 1.6GHz Centrino processor with a 1MB on-die L2 cache, 400MHz frontside bus and a half gig of DDR. It’s nothing short of impressively fast.

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.

Acer has taken a different tack to IBM with its version of Centrino. Whereas the ThinkPad focused on being small and portable, the TravelMate 800 is a better-featured notebook with a 1.6GHz processor, 15in display and a fast graphics chip

For as long as the Labs has been running, Dell has been a regular participant, and has also been a consistent performer.

After enjoying the Satellite 2800 (reviewed issue 42, p80) so much, the Toshiba Satellite Pro 4600 is a disappointment. This is surprising in that the general belief would be that the more powerful machine would be more appealing to the technically inclined than the Celeron-based Satellite 2800.