Lab

Power portables

Once upon a time, it was a fair assumption that a laptop was fine for taking notes and surfing the Internet, but for real work you needed a desktop PC. Today, mobile technology has advanced to the point where there's nothing you can do with a desktop that isn't possible on a laptop - with the added advantage of portability.

Of course, it's not much good saying the technology exists if it costs more than you can afford. The good news is, it doesn't. This month we've tested seven 'do-it-all' laptops that are powerful and versatile enough to be your only computer. And it's amazing what you can get even on a relatively modest budget.

Four of these systems, despite costing under £1,000, sport huge 17-inch widescreen displays - big enough to run serious business and creative software in comfort, and ideal for watching movies, whether downloaded from the Internet or played from the built-in DVD drive. Yet they're still built for travel.

The more compact 15.4-inch systems offer comparable features in a package that's even easier to carry around. All of them are great space-savers compared to a desktop PC, and all boast DVD writers, TV outputs, and both wired and wireless networking built in.

Nor do any of these models skimp on the operating system: all seven come pre-installed with Windows Vista Home Premium, which, as well as looking a lot nicer than its predecessors, offers handy power management and wireless networking capabilities along with Windows Media Center, the ideal way to enjoy your music and movies.

All right, we'll admit it: there are still a few areas where the desktop is king. The big one is gaming. Today's 3D games love to stretch the limits of PC hardware, and while it's technically possible to squeeze a super-powered 3D graphics system into a laptop, it tends to cost so much, and drain the battery so fast, that it makes little sense. All seven of these laptops succeeded in running our 3D games test, something that quite a few portable PCs have baulked at, but not even the strongest performer (the Zepto) could really manage a current 3D game at its screen's full resolution with all the effects turned on. If multimedia and 'edutainment' software is more your thing, however, these systems will cope fine.

Gamers don't have the option of upgrading the graphics later, because the other unavoidable shortcoming of laptop computers is expandability. Changing the graphics card in a desktop PC is a relatively simple upgrade, but it's very rare that you can do it at all with a laptop, and it's not an option with any of this month's machines.

Other upgrades, like a TV tuner or an interface for whatever newfangled wireless communication system may turn up next year, needn't be a problem, because each laptop has a PC Card or ExpressCard slot, and such devices can also be added via the USB 2.0 port, if you don't mind them sticking out a bit. But as a rule, it's wise to choose a laptop that already has the features you want.

None of these seven laptops scored less than a respectable three stars, meaning you wouldn't be disappointed with any of them. All of them have powerful dual-core processors and plenty of memory (RAM) for runningVista, and even the smallest hard disks on offer are big enough to store plenty of MP3s and videos as well as everyday applications and documents. They're all hugely capable portable systems at reasonable prices, leaving us merely to identify their strengths and weaknesses and pronounce a winner.