Advantages: Lightweight, protable, good for all business type applications
Disadvantages: poor stock specification, gets a little warm on your legs!

...I purchased my Thinkpad T20 second hand for around £300. For this money, I got the original specification machine fitted with a CDRW/DVD drive, which is an optional extra for the later models. With the ultrabay 2000, it is possible to use a range of hardware, without having to re-boot the system. Optical drives, hard disk drives and batteries are some of the possibilities to name a few. These all work at lightning speed and are so simple to change between. The lightweight design, topped good performance are impressive. The screen is 13.3 inches and is a good size and resolution for a small laptop. It comes with all the ports for network, modem, parallel and com ports, 2 PCMCIA slots and a singe USB slot. It also has a mouse and external monitor port, Infra-red port, built in speakers of a good quality for a laptop and line in... Read review

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Advantages: Great Portability and Amazing Power
Disadvantages: Screen could be classed as flimsy for heavy handed people

..., the spec if this is equivlant to a decent desktop PC. With a dual core 2Ghz processor and 1 GB of RAM, how can you go wrong...for a notebook! It also has the ingenious design of having 2 graphics cards, which can be activated by using the performance switch at the top of the keyboard. The speed setting enables a Nvidia 128MB graphics card, which is brilliant for gaming and video editing (with the firewire port which compliments this), and the stamina setting which enables a standard 128MB Intel graphics chip, which is more than suffice for internet browsing and office applications, although i have also easily managed to edit video and images on this setting. The system has 2 USB ports which i find a bit stingy for a system that cost £1600 at the time, however it helps that the PC has built in bluetooth, so if you want to plug in a keyboard... Read review

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Advantages: Was great when it worked. Nice design.
Disadvantages: Encountered huge amount of problems.

...I always wanted a laptop. It really wasn't practical for me, I had no need for it, I just always wanted one. So when a savings account was signed over to me when I was 21 the first thing I did was go looking for a laptop. No longer did I have to fight for time on the family computer, and even better, I didn't have to get out of bed to use it! Technical Info for Hp Pavilion zt1131s Intel Celeron 1.06 GHz 14.1" TFT-XGA display. 256 MB SDRAM DVD drive 20 GB hard drive. Modem 56K + LAN 10/100 Li-lon battery. Windows XP Home Edition. 3 USB Dial-up connection. Ethernet connection. Purchasing Info = I bought my laptop at my local Staples store in 2002. My parents didn't want me going mad and spending too much and after looking at a few different models, including a Sony VAIO (the shop assistant... Read review

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Advantages: Great all round performance
Disadvantages: A second battery is a must

...I would like to share my experiences of what I now lovingly call my best friend. Firstly I will admit that I am slightly biased towards the Sony brand. Having purchased their products in the past, I have found them not to be particularly competitive with regards to price, but certainly well built and durable. I purchased my Sony for a little over £950 on-line and so far I believe that I have had good value for money. To start with I will list the specifications for all who are interested, those who are not please skip to the part below for a more practical review. Dimensions: W33, D23.6, H3.7 (cm) Weight: 2.3Kg O/S: Windows Vista Home Premium CPU: Intel Core Duo 1.66Ghz FSB: 677Mhz Cashe: 2Mb L2 RAM: 2Gb DDRII @ 533Mhz HDD: 120GB SATA-150 @ 5400 rpm Optical: 6xDVD +/- RW, 8xDVD +/-R / 24xCD R/RW Combo. Display: 13.3" TFT... Read review

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Advantages: Compact, good hard drive space and processing speed
Disadvantages: Its durability, and has become out-dated

...of the home, as its durability is awful. As it’s a few years old now, it looks outdated to newer models around, and doesn’t have the newer features such as a CD/W. I think the moral of my tale is cheap price = cheap quality. When I do eventually replace this thing, I think I’ll stick to a desktop! And it won’t be an ex-display model; just in case! Full List of Specifications ***Processor*** An Intel® Celeron™ and Intel® Pentium® III processor up to 1.1 GHz ***Memory *** 128 MB and can expand to 512 MB if desired using SDRAM technology ***Hard Disk *** HDD storage up to 20 GB. ***CD-ROM drive *** 24 Speed with a Transfer rate of 16.7 MB/s ***Diskette drive*** Storage capacity: 1.44 MB ***Display*** 13.3" TFT active matrix colour display with an internal resolution of 1024 x 768 pixels, and a colour palette of 16... Read review

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Advantages: Size weight and speed
Disadvantages: upgrading to vista a nightmare

...I bought this laptop mainly because its specification fitted what i was looking for its looks and I trusted the Brand. On receipt in January I got it in the sales for £1450.00 from Comet, it came with windows xp professional pre installed but with the option to upgrade to Vista Ultimate for free when it became available. The laptop is small and light enough to be portable and performs all office tasks asked of it effortlessly as i had purchased it to help complete my University Course it was great for carrying to and fro uni. Specification Cpu: Intel Centrino Core2 Duo running @ 2Ghz Ram : 2Gb DDR2 configured as 2x 1GB chips Storage: 100Gb serial ata Hard Drive Video card Nvidia Geforce Go 128mb Built in notebook Camera 0.37 megapixel Screen: 13.3"tft running natively at 1280x800 Optical Storage intregrated dvd/cd recorder... Read review

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Advantages: LIght, powerful, safe
Disadvantages: expensive

...mentioning those to give you an idea of what the VAIO series of laptops have to offer. << Sony VAIO SZ4XWN/C >> This is the middle model of the SZ series of laptops making it the 2nd most expensive. On the SONY site the price posted is £ 1,531.06 without VAT. I am not 100% sure what my dad paid for his but I am sure it was not far off of that. Personally I think that is too much for a laptop but if I had that kind of money I would probably just get the best I could get. I am also slightly angry at my dad because now he has the most powerful computer in the house but I'll get a better computer soon I have been saving up for a while. It comes with lots of different technological gadgets like the fingerprint recognition that work with the just the swipe of a finger but I think I have mentioned that one enough times throughout this. It has... Read review

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Advantages: Sturdy, made by IBM
Disadvantages: Doesnt look all that good next to the likes of Sony

...In November last year, I bought an IBM ThinkPad 600 Laptop computer. It is second hand, but only just over a year old. It cost £500 incl VAT and this is what I got for my money? PII 300 Processor 64 MB Ram 5 Gig HDD 24x CD-Rom 13.3? screen 56K modem I needed a laptop for work, so was looking for something that isn't afraid of getting carted around. Now, I know that's the general idea of laptops, but these days they seem to be built to look good and not to be durable when carrying them around. That's fine if you leave your laptop on your desk all the time, but this needs to be carried around a lot, and in any case, I've got the desktop PC which sits on my desk! First of all, fashion conscious people will not like the IBM series of laptops. They are built to be durable and tough, not in the slightest to look good... Read review

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Advantages: Swivel Hinge, Handwriting mode, Fingerprint Recognition, Awesome Features
Disadvantages: Expensive

....7 million colours) *****Video***** Graphics Processor / Vendor ………………………………………………………….Intel GMA 900 Video Memory ………………………………………………………….Dynamic Video Memory Technology 3.0 Max Resolution (external) ………………………………………………………….2048 x 1536 / 24-bit (16.7 million colours) *****Audio***** Audio Output ………………………………………………………….Sound card Audio Codec ………………………………………………………….AD1981B Compliant Standards ………………………………………………………….DirectSound, AC '97, SoundMAX Audio Input ………………………………………………………….Microphone Now, unfortunately, in my opinion the tablet PC would have been better off being available as widescreen however, nonetheless, a 12.1 inch TFT screen is still great. The colour resolution and quality of the images is astounding. When watching movies on this, I couldn't really believe that a laptop so small and compact... Read review

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Advantages: Cheap
Disadvantages: Old

...When I got my IMB ThinkPad which was a few years ago now I was really pleased with it. 300mhz might not seem like a lot now but back then it was like 3ghz by todays standards. - Design - Laptops have only recently got a lot smaller and are a lot easier to use. My ThinkPad was easy to use because of it's good design. You have a standard keyboard layout but the keys are a lot smaller which is a problem for my big fingers. The black works well and doesn't show up as many marks. - Speed - 300mhz might not seem like much now a days but a few years ago it was fast. You could pay well over a grand and still end up with 120mhz. The Think Pad's processor was something special and was very fast. It might not seem fast now as I have a 2ghz processor but I was very impressed with IBM for a very nice computer. - Features - I... Read review

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