The latest addition to Sony's VAIO notebook family is the VGN-Z12GN and is designed for mobile users that want a tough, stylish and swift notebook for their journeys. On all those counts, this VAIO succeeds without any trouble.

Tough carbon-fibre body, excellent application performance, great battery life, useful and useable features, fingerprint scanner, oodles of hard disk space.

Quite expensive, keyboard can be difficult to use.

If you can stomach the asking price, this VAIO will prove a super-tough and super-fast companion on any trip.

Acer's new Aspire 6920G notebook is a desktop replacement model and one that we're happy to say is actually something we'd use everyday, in place of a fully-fledged desktop PC.

Strong gaming performance, brilliant LCD screen, fantastic styling, well priced, punchy speaker system.

Very heavy, fingerprint scanner sits in between the mouse buttons.

Unlike most desktop replacements that fall short, the Aspire 6920G is the real deal.

Toshiba's Satellite range is designed to give users the most bangs for their buck. This lineup includes notebooks that fall into the desktop replacement, portable and ultra-portable categories - the last of which the U400-10J is part of.

Looks great, excellent value, LCD is brilliant, swift application machine, compact and lightweight.

Body retains fingerprints and smudges, trackpad could have been bigger, loads of apps installed by default.

An attractively priced ultra-portable that scores well on application performance, usability and portability. Great for travelling.

Toshiba's Satellite X200 series of desktop replacement notebooks are designed for gamers and the X200-23G - tested here - is the top model from the family.

Good sound system, beast when it comes to applications, can play DirectX 10 games at lower detail settings, brilliant LCD screen.

HD DVD drive is pointless, a little expensive.

If you can't afford to pay the space penalty for a fully-fledged PC, the X200-23G is worth considering as it is by far the fastest gaming and apps notebook we've tested to date.

Pininfarina is an Italian car design firm associated with companies such as Ferrari and Maserati, so it was no surprise to find our test sample SimpleDrive Portable was a sharp looker.

If you arent overly concerned about winning transfer speeds, this drive offers value and sharp looks.

The iPower is one of Packard Bell's newest PCs and priced at $2724, it certainly falls into the high-end PC price category. So does it have what it takes under the bonnet?

Great water-cooling kit, fast hard drive performance, good application machine, game-friendly keyboard and mouse, nVidia SLI support.

BIOS doesnt allow overclocking, poor gaming performance, limited GPU upgrade path due to low wattage power supply.

As an all-round, high-end home machine, the iPower is letdown by its imbalanced configuration. Although it is a quick app monster, its gaming performance is underpar, which is unfortunate considering its high asking price.

To use, the Dell is very comfortable thanks to its soft touch keys and responsive trackpad. Its 13.3-inch LCD is also a quality display, better than the identically sized screen offered by Fujitu Siemens? LifeBook S6410 (reviewed last month) in terms ...

A fashionable player that packs strong performance punches in every department.

Usability wise, this Sony sports one of the nicest keyboards we've had the pleasure of typing on. Its keys feel solid and are super responsive to boot.

This Vaio offers the full shebang in terms of apps and entertainment capabilities.

While fashion-conscious business types might find the S6410's looks a little too understated, its specifications, stats and performance make this reasonably priced kit a quality buy for the pragmatic professional. All in all, a quality buy.

The Express is a solid choice for those who need an ultra-convenient player with good features.

On the performance front, the Acer managed the second best gaming scores in this exam behind the Asus; no doubt thanks to its HD 2300 GPU. As an application's machine, the Aspire pulled a repeat performance, as it was again the second fastest here.

The Aspire 7720G manages to balance aggressive pricing with up-to-date features and speedy overall application and gaming performance.