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

Apple’s 17-inch PowerBook G4 is a thing of beauty, shaming the other 17- inch notebooks with its size, weight and design – perhaps with the exception of the ASUS.

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

The Samsung M40 plus is a slick and stylish notebook, but unfortunately just doesn’t cut it compared to the others on test here.

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.

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 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.

Few games have been as unanimously wellreceived, and so uniformly controversial, than the Grand Theft Auto series.

GTR is, without any doubt, the very best racing simulation on the market.

Here’s a new twist on extending the life and profitability of a game!

Juiced pays tribute to EA’s Need for Speed: Underground, as much as NFS: Underground pays tribute to the film 2 Fast 2 Furious.

Sometimes it’s best to deliver bad news straight up – Pariah is a really mediocre first person shooter.

Pyro Studios, the development team behind the Commandos series, has turned its hand to the hybrid RTS/ table-top strategy genre – a genre which consists primarily of Creative Assembly’s brilliant Total War games.

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.

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

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

Slightly over budget and over-specified to fit within last month’s budget projector roundup, the Casio XJ-360 is a very compact and very capable projector that may just be worth those extra dollars.

Hot on the heels of last month’s sub- $2500 projector roundup is HP’s new vp6315.