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.

Very narrowly pipped for the top placing Labs winner award this month, Plus offers an impressive performing gaming machine with all the bells and whistles you'd expect to find at this price point. Wrapped in the attractive Cooler Master Cavalier wave housing, there's no ultra portability to be found here. The clear advantage of moving away from small form factor housing is not being starved for space internally.

If you're after an ultra portable, this isn't the notebook for you. If you're after a large form factored portable desktop replacement, this could be the ticket. This behemoth of a notebook features a 17-inch widescreen display and a footprint to match.

It’s one of the facts of the gaming hobbyist’s life: cutting edge games require cutting edge hardware. It’s as set in stone as Moore’s Law (which is itself now 40 years old). Every 12 to 18 months you need to upgrade or get left behind. Our contenders this month make a very good case for starting with a clean slate, and none more so than this month’s winner, the Modtech Civic-64FX.

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.

We know you want to play games, so we've put 18 PCI Express graphics cards under the microscope to see who really does the job the best.

We love hardware. As users ourselves we feel your pangs of wanting the newest, fastest rig and components. Unfortunately it's hard to justify the cost of bleeding-edge hardware at the best of times - more so with the cost of single graphics cards at times exceeding the $1000 price barrier. This is as much as some users would spend on a total system upgrade.

Dan Chiappini shows you how to get the most out of your graphics cards, without ever picking up a soldering iron.

When it comes to notebooks, there are a few different flavours with their own specialties.  The trick to purchasing the right notebook is to know your needs and the intended purposes of the unit so you can properly match the correct machine with your requirements.

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.

The iSTAR ID-17VSSBK is bright, sharp and clear and is housed in an attractive two tone glossy black and silver bezel which would match both the minimalist home or work environment.

When we ran four tablet PCs in December 2002 (Issue 61, page 36) we got plenty of response from readers looking to find out more about them. Over a year on now and tablets have increased dramatically in spec and design although pricing hasn’t reduced as much as we’d expected - possibly since they still haven’t made mass market appeal and sales.

The first Dothan notebook to roll off the rank, we were interested to see exactly how much real-world gain Intel is offering in its revised Centrino platform.

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.

The Kodak EasyShare Printer Dock 6000 is a tiny photo printer-cum-camera dock for Kodak EasyShare CX/DX 6000 and LS600-series cameras. Although it's designed to print 4 x 6in borderless prints, the dock is capable of a lot more. The abundance of functions this dock can perform boggles the mind. Ranging from slide show streaming, three-hour camera Li-Ion battery charging, multiple print runs and PC file-synching, this printer does it all.

While 64-bit computing has been around for a while (for the two of you who could afford Intel's Itanium, and now Itanium II processors), the dream of 64-bittery for the humble home system has been a long time coming.