It's expensive, but the MacBook Pro offers better performance and speed than its predecessors and ships standard with a whole range of intuitive features

If you need a media and gaming notebook with a lot of power, and battery life isn't your primary concern, the Qosmio F30 is a great choice.

A powerful notebook that will run everything from Office to the latest 3-D games. Aside from flexing of the screen bezel, this is a solid machine that has a lot to offer.

The Acer is a powerful notebook, capable of operating as a media centre PC.

It's hard to agree with this format as there is little benefit for a lot of work and considerably more noise. It's not that it hasn't been well engineered or that it doesn't produce good results, it's just that it doesn't seem worth it. For the same price you can get an equal performer with less of a heating issue and less bulk. As a desktop replacement it's fine, but as a notebook we're not impressed.

It's a shame to have to minus points from this notebook because of the HD-DVD player, but its limited utility is unavoidable. Otherwise it's a powerful and functional desktop replacement with plenty of media features.

This AMD Turion 64 TL60 based notebook is a powerful machine. The extra 1GB of RAM helps boost its performance, but with all DIMM slots full there's no more room for upgrading and you're essentially looking at the best this notebook can do.

Lenovo thrills us with many useful features on this IdeaPad Y710-200, but it fumbles the ball a little in its implementation of the 'Game Zone'. It's also let down by a lack of Gigabit networking and a digital TV tuner.

The entertainment is sweet on the HP Pavilion dv4000, a great consumer laptop that serves up DVD movies and CD music without requiring you to boot up.

At 4.9kg, this large desktop replacement may not be very portable, but it packs some power.

A nice laptop but a little on the heavy side.

Our only real gripe with the machine is the one-year warranty as standard - although your local retailer may be able to extend it themselves.