The Dell Inspiron 6000 walks into this roundup with a serious disadvantage – packing only an Intel P-M 1.86GHz and an ATI Mobility RADEON X300 it is easily outgunned by the competition.

We dubbed the ASUS ‘The Black Box’ because, like its aeronautical namesake, it records everything.

The days of featureless notebooks are over. Adam Turner hunts down the latest entertainment notebooks on the market.

The Pioneer DreamBook Power 900 is a locally built monster – this isn’t a desktop replacement, it’s a desk.

The Toshiba Satellite P30 is a 17-inch behemoth with a price tag to match.

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

The NEC Versa M540 is a mixed bag, with middle of the road benchmarks and a high gloss display well suited to watching movies, but not the best for gaming. 

You really have to look to the 17-inch giants like the HP Pavilion zd8001AP to find machines that were designed as multimedia beasts from the ground up.

The Acer Aspire 1692 WLMi is a story of compromises; a +/-/RAM dual layer burner and gigabit Ethernet are offset by Windows XP Home, only 512MB of RAM and the slowest processor and hard disk of the bunch.

Like the Pioneer, the Protac Excel D495 is another locally built giant – at this size we’re wading into desktop replacement territory.

The Omega Viewmaster Portiva 5Z71 is another notebook comprising of tradeoffs; the blistering Pentium-M 2GHz processor offset by an NVIDIA GeForce Go660 graphics card with only 64MB of video memory, accompanied by the smallest hard drive of the bunch.