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.

One of the cheapest Vista SSD notebooks we've seen yet, though we're surprised by the benchmark results.

Apple and style are synonymous and the rounded lines and gloss white plastic chassis add to its durability and looks. Its slot-mounting combo DVD-ROM/CD-RW means there are no moving parts to break off in accidents, and serve to provide additional storage space should the comparatively small 30GB hard disk not be enough room for your files.

The Acer has all the bells and whistles you're going to need as a student, or mobile office worker; and then some.

Powerful laptops have to be big, bulky and ugly, right? Not necessarily. Samsung's new line of laptops is proving that portability, style and performance are not necessarily mutually exclusive.

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.

Dell's reputation at providing reasonably priced capable 'books shines through in the 510M - the cheapest notebook on test this month.

The Portege A200 also has many of the necessary features we would expect in an education notebook, including LAN and modem ports, two USB ports, a DVD-ROM, and 802.11b/g with an wireless on/off switch.

The Todaytech M120W, even though it's based on an OEM housing, is all style with its glossy royal blue top, and the silver surrounds on the palm rest and screen.

While the build quality of the ASUS A4000L is good and sturdy, this notebook is much larger than the others featured in our roundup.

This month's winner, the A510 from Targa well and truly trounced the competitors this month, with the exception of Dell who trailed by only three points.

Designed with portability in mind, this notebook is slim, sexy and versatile, enabling basic office usage, DVD playback or even some weekend gaming.

Coming in under our stringent pricing scheme, ASUS bettered it by $50 and managed to include some great hardware and features unavailable in some of the more expensive units.

Although heavily kitted out with an ATI Mobility RADEON 9700 featuring 128MB of dedicated video memory, 1.5GHz Pentium M and half a gigabyte of PC2700 DDR, the Zephyra XT finished in the lower half for overall placement.

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.

Taking first place overall, the MegaBook M510C had a bit of a mixed run to the final score tally, managing only fifth place in PCMark04 then unanimously taking out first place with a score nearly breaking 10,000 3DMarks, impressive for a notebook, let alone one under $2500.

Absolutely blitzing the field for performance, no other notebook this month could get anywhere near the PowerNote 258SA from Digital Star, despite many trying. Pushing out an absolutely massive 4216 marks, this powerhouse left a 640 mark gap between it and its closest contender, the Toshiba Satellite A30.

Finishing third in PCMark04, fifth in 3DMark01SE and around middle of the pack for battery life, the Z7W from Astone is an attractive and functional widescreen notebook with plenty of goodies.

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.

An above average overall finisher, the Targa's claim to fame is undoubtedly its long battery run times, achieving the best part of 5 hours on a single charge whilst juggling a full productivity workload of Photoshop and Microsoft Office.