It may look like a bit of a dinosaur design, but the nimble performance and excellent battery life make up for the looks

The 12in 1280 x 800 screen is very bright indeed, and the text is crisp. Colour accuracy is excellent, with yellows that leap off the screen with sunshiney joy and reds that pop. Like most business laptops, the screen finish is matte, but the ...

It's taken a while, but PC manufacturers are increasingly seeking to recast the dowdy PC laptop as a stylish lifestyle accessory.

, it weighs a creditably light 1.69kg

A poor touchpad and below-par build quality undermine a budget laptop with plenty of potential

It's a result that's right up there with the best laptops we've seen, and certainly puts the Inspiron on a par with netbooks. While the A-Listed netbook, Samsung's N110, kept going for even longer - 11 hours - it has a smaller screen to keep lit

Rainy weekend in Sydney? Check. Spiffy new gaming laptop to snuggle up to? Check.

Yes, you read that right, it's a mobile HD 5870 GPU, with 1GB VRAM. Tasty

What do you call a CULV laptop that doesn't look like a CULV laptop? Meet Dell's thin and light Inspiron 1470.

But it's in battery life that the Inspiron really cleans up. With nearly four hours on heavy use and a whopping 9hrs 13mins on our light-use benchmark, it brings together a combination of power and performance matched by no other laptop this month

A lot of 3D movies have appeared on the big screen over the last year. Though some argue it's merely a gimmick, 3D is also now appearing on small screens - in this case, the Acer 5738DG 3D laptop.

Overall, the touchpad surface is smooth and is separated well, thanks to the textured wrist pad next to it, but the mouse buttons can be a little stiff. If you use them, there is a fingerprint scanner in the middle of the mouse buttons

Packed with features, only its value for money lets it escape without an award this month

The updated version now available has a T9550. These powerful core components mean battery life isn't great. The Studio 17 managed just 1hr 54mins in our light-use test; this is a laptop that won't leave the mains too often

The m15x is another out-of-this-world laptop design from Alienware. Is it onto something, or just on another planet?

It trundles along at a mere 1.6GHz, but will accelerate to nearly 3GHz if only one core is under use

The cheapest way to get OS X, but it has all of the MacBook Pro's shortcomings and more of its own

With an Nvidia 9400M GPU, gaming performance isn't bad either. In our low-detail Crysis test, the MacBook achieved a respectable 27fps

Apple's MacBook Pro is a design masterpiece, even if its brilliance is marred by a few annoying niggles.

The internal lithium-polymer battery keeps the MacBook going for more than nine hours under Apple's OS X. However, we found battery life shrank to short of six hours while running under Vista