Right now, this is the best bargain to be had in the notebook world.

The Acer Aspire SA20 is a machine built on a budget and it performs accordingly.

Like clowns piling out of the other kind of Mini, you’ll be similarly surprised at how much Apple has managed to squeeze into the Mac mini.

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 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.

While large formed notebooks are great for the users with a static location, ultra portables are still the easiest and best way of conducting business for students, business people and the road warriors.

Widescreen notebooks are the way of the future, really they are. With entertainment now proficiently done on the go, why would we go back to limited 4:3 aspect ratio? It's far easier to work on two spreadsheets concurrently in widescreen without needing to alt tab like a madman. Toshiba, like many manufacturers, has seen this need and provided such a product.

For those users after the shift away from a Microsoft world to an OS X platform, Apple have got a deal for you. Starting at a mere $1699, you can pick up an G4 iBook capable of more than just entertainment uses.

The iMac has always been a little more about style than function and the latest iteration is testament to this philosophy. The most noticeable thing about the iMac G5 is the massive 20 inch widescreen. It's a Big Mac. Geddit?

MSI's MegaBook L61OI lives up to its 'mega' moniker with a large 15.4-inch widescreen TFT, desktop CPU, excellent graphics and pumping audio. The model we looked at was a pre-production prototype notebook and as such was a little shaky and did not come with all the inclusions a final model will have. As a proof of concept, however, the notebook is quite good.

This pre-production notebook was shipped to us in a professional looking silver lockable briefcase. We were expecting to see top secret government papers rather than a slimline ultra low voltage (ULV) notebook.

This tiny notebook, measuring a mere 26.5 x 22 x 2.1cm looks quite ordinary on the outside, yet comes with quite an interesting processor inside. The Valeo CP10 is not powered by Intel or AMD, nor even Transmeta, but instead has one of the first VIA Antaur CPUs we've come across.

If laptops were cars, then the Pioneer Power 470 would be a caravan - a quick scan of the specs reveals that it has almost everything. The 470 model we tested was a 3.06GHz Pentium 4 unit with a large 60GB of drive space and 256MB of DDR.

Intel’s push on Centrino notebook branding has only made it so far in the six months since its introduction. So far prices have been high for Centrino notebooks, although Emagen looks set to change this mindset, now offering the N1000 model as a cost-effective alternative option to top of the line name brand notebooks with all the bells and whistles.

Despite not being the smallest or lightest notebook, this veritable speed demon packs a 3.06GHz desktop Pentium 4 processor and is matched with an ATI Mobility 9000 graphics adaptor and quarter gig of PC2100 DDR RAM. Another notebook to dispose of legacy parallel, PS/2 and serial ports, it boasts a pair of rear mounted USB ports, S-Video output and FireWire connectivity. Also included are 10/100 Ethernet, a 56K modem and single PCMCIA slot for card expansion.

This is not the first 'desknote' that we've reviewed (see Protac DeskNote, June 2002, page 37) but in our estimation the Aspire 1703SC is the first system that truly expounds the virtues of true desknote-ism.

When we opened the box for the Dream PC from Pioneer, we though there must have been some kind of mistake. Coming in a form factor reminiscent of external hard disk units, the Dream PC packs an entire P4 system in a surprisingly small space, and at 3kg, it weighs less than some notebooks.

You can't help but to notice the slim-line chassis with its brushed aluminium finish this machine sports. Flipping down the front panel reveals the front-mounted audio, USB, and infrared port, which is a nice inclusion for those corporate customers using PDAs or mobile phones with IR synching.