For General Use

If you don’t need a notebook that’s unusually light, unusually powerful or unusually portable, you can pay anything from £500 to £1,000 and get a dual core 15.4” machine with 1 or 2 GB of RAM and good multimedia options. Expect a hard drive that’s 120, 160 or 200 GB and a multi-format DVD burner. Memory card slots are common, Ethernet and modems are in every machine and you’ll find FireWire, Webcams and TV tuners in more expensive systems. Battery life is typically three to four hours, much less if you’re watching a DVD.

Most mainstream notebooks have 15” screens and widescreens are becoming increasingly common. If you want something bigger, Toshiba has several well-priced 17” notebooks in the Satellite P200 range, from the £600 Dual Core 13Z model with 1 GB of RAM up to the £1055 2 GHz Core 2 Duo P200 156, with 2 GB of RAM and a 250 GB hard drive. The Nvidia Geforce Go 7600 isn’t for hardcore gamers but it handles Vista, DVD playback and mainstream games well. The 1440 x 900 resolution isn’t the highest you can get on a 17” screen but the P200 models have the usual rich, bright, vivid Toshiba screens. Plus you get Bluetooth, Draft n Wi-Fi, HD audio, S-Video and FireWire, a 1.3 megapixel Webcam and a numeric keypad.

Stick with a 15” screen and more of your money is going on the processor. For £699, the HP Pavilion dv6500 is a stylish media notebook with backlit controls and a 2 GHz Core Duo that competes with much pricier systems; if you want it for gaming pay the extra for the Nvidia GeForce Go 7400. An HD DVD drive or ExpressCard TV tuner will put the price up too, but there’s an HDMI port so you can connect to a TV and good quality stereo speakers for watching movies. You get every flavour of WiFi, Draft n as well as a, b and g, a fingerprint reader for security and a seven-in-one memory card slot for getting pictures off any camera, plus four hours of battery life.

If the budget won’t stretch quite that far, you can get a 1.73 GHz Core 2 Duo with 2 GB of RAM like the Gateway MT6839b that will run Vista Home Premium quite competently for around £600. The Dell Inspiron 1520 has a slightly slower processor (1.66 GHz) and only 1 GB of RAM for the same price, but it compensates with Nvidia GeForce Go 8400M graphics. Plus you can choose from a range of colours for the case.

The Alienware Area-51 m5550 starts at reasonable £699 for a good gaming system with a 15.4” widescreen and Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme 7.1 surround sound, but the price can easily creep up to nearly twice that if you take the 1920 x 1200 option and plump for the 2.3 GHz Core 2 Duo, 2 GB of RAM, 200 GB hard drive and the Nvidia GeForce Go 7600. It’s still cheaper than most gaming systems with this performance but battery life is poor and at this price it’s heading out of the mainstream.