Labs

Asus' F3Sr was the only laptop in this group to score a full 5 out of 5 for its generous complement of features. You wouldn't expect a budget laptop to come with all the trimmings, but in this case it's hard to think of anything else that could have been added. All the laptops here have wireless networking as standard, but the F3Sr is the only one to include Bluetooth as well - handy for transferring music and photos to or from your mobile, or using a headset. It's also the only laptop here with a fingerprint reader, so even if someone nicks it, or someone who might know your password decides to have a peep, they won't get their mitts on your private documents. Not even the kids.

The extras don't come at the expense of build quality. If

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anything, the Asus is a bit on the chunky side; at nearly 3kg, it's not much lighter than the 17 inch Zoostorm, and we'd hesitate to sling it in a bag unless we were taking the car. But the flipside is that the F3Sr feels very solid, and its strong, stylish lid seems well up to defending the display.

Spend a bit of time using the Asus, and the quality of construction pays dividends elsewhere. The keyboard provides full-sized keys with a good positive action. They did suffer from a little side-to-side wobble, but typing for extended periods was still comfortable. The wide, spacious trackpad is equally praiseworthy: responsive and accurate, it made light work of navigating through menus.

Even performance is well above par. The Intel T5450's dual cores powered the Asus to a fine result of 120% in our general 2D benchmark, and you even get passable gaming performance thanks to ATI's X1250 graphics chip. 27% in our Call of Duty 2 benchmark may not sound like much, but as long as you don't expect to play modern games at super-high detail settings it'll do a decent job.

So why isn't this machine our winner? One single reason: terrible battery life. Just an hour and 40 minutes of light use is well below par for a standard sized machine. If you don't plan to stay long away from the mains, it's well worth a look.