An inexpensive laptop that, when it comes to style and quality, more than punches above its weight

A decent notebook but too expensive for the features on offer.

A decent machine with plenty of power, but it’s not earth shattering in terms of features and value.

Good value, but it needs to decide whether it’s a business or consumer notebook.

The new model in Benq's V series may just be an evolution, but under the skin there's a power revolution.

Despite some welcome additions and good components, this Acer notebook is left wanting.

Very powerful and, with few features missing, it’s good value at the price.

A new Core2 Duo based laptop has found its way into the labs, and from the outset, we like it.

Dell's 6400 is a great value mid-range notebook with very few weaknesses. The support is the icing on the cake.

Good features for the price. It’s just not very exciting.

The screen isn't great, but everything else about this notebook is very good indeed.

The sweet taste of AM2, in the form of an ultraportable powerhouse.

A solid but unremarkable notebook offering a good set of features and excellent warranty.

The Inspiron 630m is Dell’s first 14-inch widescreen notebook.

Not all multimedia notebooks have to weigh in around the $5000 mark. Digital Star’s 15.4in widescreen PowerNote Z71V offers very good value for money for a laptop sporting a 2GHz Pentium M, 1GB of RAM and a 128MB NVIDIA GeForce Go 6600 graphics chip.

Acer and AMD are both sponsors of the Ferrari F1 team, and the relationship extends well beyond simply slapping each others logos on respective products.

The 9300 is reminiscent of its predecessor, the Inspiron 9100, which was pitched squarely at power users and gamers looking for plenty of grunt. This product refresh takes it one step further by using a mobile processor rather than the desktop CPU found in the 9100.

For such a high specification machine with a large display, we didn’t have high expectations of battery life. We were wrong. Not only is this one of the best looking and functional notebooks we’ve played with in some time, but this notebook managed to stay operating at full load with a looping productivity test for well over three and a half hours – enough for students, road warriors and home users.

The Civic Diamond 2015.xT is more than a little similar to Digital Star's PowerNote CL56 (reviewed November 2004, page 43), featuring the same OEM housing. Designed to take care of any application you can throw at it, it's a capable book that will handle DirectX 8 and 9 games, as well as churn through productivity apps.

The Qosmio is the absolute pinnacle in multimedia notebooks. It brings everything you need for a good Windows XP Media Center Edition (MCE) system and squeezes it into a notebook form-factor. Albeit a large notebook form-factor. Yes the Qosmio is a huge and heavy notebook, but it's not nearly as heavy as it would have been if it was packed with desktop internals as many desknotes of this size usually are.