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

Only a few years ago, rocking up to a LAN party or a movie night with nothing but a notebook under your arm would have made you the laughing stock of your friends. Notebooks were bulky, ugly creatures that sacrificed everything for the sake of portability – leaving you with a glorified typewriter not worthy to calculate the operational parameters of a desk-bound multimedia beast. Heat is the natural enemy of the notebook, but the march of progress has seen designers conquer this and other hurdles to create a breed of powerful notebooks that can more than hold their own in a death match.
 
A new notebook quickly becomes your constant companion and you use it for work and play. If you’re going to be seen with it under your arm, you want passers-by to drool over its sexy bod as well as the grunt that lies within. Sleek designs with splashes of black and silver abound, accompanied by expanses of widescreen real estate.
 
Dedicated multimedia buttons and highgloss LCDs are there to appease movie-lovers, while improved screen response times and phenomenal benchmarks are luring gamers away from their boxes.
 
For this month’s roundup we threw down the gauntlet, calling on notebook builders pit their best 15.4 and 17-inch multimedia beasts against all comers. Many were called, few were chosen. Features abound, from TV tuners and remote controls to built-in webcams – supported by bucket loads of raw grunt – and we tell you which ones are the best investments.