Product Reviews

The Acer Aspire 3692WLMi reviewed on page 16 shows that even budget notebooks are fairly powerful these days. However, if you want a notebook that can race through tough tasks and play games as well, you'll still need to spend a bit more.

Many of the notebooks in this month's Labs test are capable of doing both to some degree but, at around £200 more, Rock's Pegasus 665 should outperform them all. With 2GB of RAM, its Intel Core Duo processor certainly made short work of our benchmarks. It's more than capable of taking on processor-intensive computing tasks such as video editing, but it was no quicker in Windows than the best notebooks in our Labs.

Fortunately, the Rock combines good Windows performance with reasonable 3D power, thanks to its Nvidia GeForce Go 7600 graphics processor. It's the best of the affordable mobile chipsets, but you may find you have to compromise graphical detail to get some games running at smooth frame rates.

Whether you're editing video or playing games, a good display is essential. The Pegasus has one of

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the best we've seen. It's bright, and capable of a clean white without any colour tint. The backlighting is even across the whole display and there's no sign of the grain that can spoil some screens. Our Doom 3 test looked superb, with loads of detail visible in darker areas.

The keyboard could do with more feedback, though the keys size and depth of travel are good. The touch pad is accurate, and can be deactivated with a toggle switch, which is very useful for gamers or typists who might accidentally brush it. There's a good range of ports around the chassis edges. As well as three USB2 ports and FireWire, there's a memory card reader, optical S/PDIF audio output, and DVI port. Among the ports is a volume control dial, which is handier than using the usual keyboard short cuts. The speakers are fair for a notebook, but they lack bass and can sound a bit harsh.

You'll be able to store plenty of music on the100GB hard disk, but 10GB of its space is filled by Windows Vista Home Premium. A few game installations and video files could see you quickly running out of free space and at this price you could reasonably expect a 120GB or 160GB disk.

This notebook is rather heavy to carry around every day, and you won't get far from the mains with its battery, which lasted for an appalling one hour and 29 minutes. It also gets rather hot underneath, even when simply idling, so it could be uncomfortable to use on your lap. It's a powerful computer, though, which comes with a three-year collect and return warranty. It's suitable for most tasks and for playing the odd game, but its poor battery life prevents it getting a higher score.