Labs

HiGrade's A9800R is one big, chunky laptop. It's the heaviest on test here by some margin, and at 3.8kg we'd think twice before carrying it upstairs, let alone out of the house.

But that's beside the point. The Ultinote isn't designed to be carried about in your briefcase, it's a far neater replacement for a desktop PC. What's more, at just £499 it's probably the cheapest laptop we've seen that could qualify as a desktop replacement. The 120GB hard drive and 1GB of memory aren't especially generous, but all the boxes are ticked for usable Windows performance.

Some corner-cutting is evident in the bland, plasticky case. The large silver lid might not flex too much, but prodding

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its rear resulted in some worrying show-through on the display. If you were thinking of travelling with the Ultinote, you'd want a tough bag to protect it. Things improve once it's opened up. We found the keyboard pleasant to type on, though slightly spongey. Our only complaint was that while the large trackpad worked perfectly, its was too easy to select another window accidentally with your palms while typing.

The HiGrade's specification isn't particularly high, and we wouldn't expect it to be at this price, but it's OK. HiGrade couldn't stretch to one of Intel's latest Core 2 Duos, but the older T2080 still managed 102% in our general 2D benchmark. Gaming performance is non-existent thanks to the Intel integrated graphics.

Still, you might happily trade gaming ability for a big, clear 17 inch display, and that's exactly what the HiGrade offers. Colours are a touch oversaturated, and narrow viewing angles leave the image fading away if you move too far away from head on, which is a pity for movie viewing; but for a budget display it's impressive.

Battery life isn't. Less than two and a half hours is the longest you can spend away from the mains. That may not be such a big deal with this kind of machine, but compared to the Zoostorm, for example, it's short.