The AS2400DW picked up the Labs Winner award this month for several reasons. Primarily, it offers excellent performance for a notebook – it came first across the board in all our benchmark tests. Unlike its two doppelgangers (the offerings from PC Club and Targa feature identical chassis and some identical features), the Civic uses a desktop 2.4GHz Pentium 4, rather than the slower 1.8GHz model. It was this specifically that gave it the edge in our tests.
Performance isn't the only place where the Civic excels: it also features an excellent three-year warranty, a good variety of ports and a reasonably fast DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive.
The ModTech still suffers from one or two flaws: its build quality isn't as good as either of the other winning notebooks on this page – it's not quite as solid, streamlined or ultimately eye-pleasing. It's also a little on the heavy side, weighing 3.9kg with its power adaptor, which isn't a great option if you're on the road a lot.
Like more than half the notebooks we looked at this month, the Civic uses a desktop processor rather than a specialised mobile type. This means it offers staggering performance, but doesn't use power as efficiently as a mobile counterpart would, resulting in a fairly average battery life of two hours and 16 minutes.
These are minor quibbles however, for the number of features and performance the Civic offers it's a first-rate notebook.