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 remarkably tough machine that will endure almost anything thrown at it, although this comes at a price.

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.

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.

Fastest Notebook

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.

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 range has come a long way from its brick-like origins,