Never a company to shy away from new ideas, Asus has been experimenting with new materials and designs on its laptops in recent months. The Asus W6 (£1599 inc. VAT) is one such machine, featuring a leather-covered palm-rest and lid

One of the best known brands in the world, Sony's VAIO range includes both consumer and corporate laptops. Unveiling a new design, the Sony VAIO VGN-N11S/W is a straightforward consumer laptop, ideally suited to the first-time buyer

While the sub-£799 price range is often linked to the consumer market, more corporate laptops are appearing. Although identically specified to the consumer systems in this review, the HP Compaq nx7400 is a well-built and affordable business laptop

Sold in the UK through Toys-R-Us, Gateway markets the MX6933b (£799 inc. VAT) as a high-end home entertainment laptop. While a lack of multimedia features makes this a strange decision, this is still one of the best laptops you can buy at this price

We waited nigh on a year for any PC innovation, and then three things came along at once: Quad Core, the G80, and Vista. Hi-Grade's high-end box doesn't quite reach to the lofty heights of the Greatest Graphics Card Ever, but it's still a beauty

Now that Windows Vista has been released, PC resellers are falling over themselves to sell the first systems with the OS preinstalled. Many have offered Vista as a free upgrade from Windows XP, redeemable through a voucher scheme

Dell has recently cast aside its tradition of using Intel processors and built a series of PCs sporting the chips of rival manufacturer AMD. This machine is one of the first AMDbased systems to adopt the BTX form factor.

Time was, if you wanted high-end gear in an off-thepeg unit, you paid upwards of £3,000. Well, this rig flicks the bird to that concept. No PC we've ever tested has run games as well as this one.

A month or two ago we would all have been drooling over this latest Power Mac with its 2.7GHz twin PowerPC processors. It's a real monster of a Mac and at the top of Apple's tree

There are many different tricks that manufacturers can employ to make their tower systems stand out, but PC Next Day hasn't employed any of them.

When you unpack the Elite E6400 (ANS) you're confronted with the usual Mesh tower system. It looks good enough from a distance and in photographs, but close up the plastic case feels a little cheap

No, it's not a mistake, this really is a Windows Media Center system, complete with digital/analog TV tuner. This isn't quite the bargain it seems, though, because the package we reviewed doesn't include a monitor.

When we review something, we apportion an amount of time to do it. Unfortunately, much of the time was wasted wrestling with an obscure driver set and fiddling with what appears to be a faulty DVI port

Evesham's Mini PC behaves just like a regular desktop computer except that it's designed with home entertainment in mind. It runs Windows XP Media Center Edition, the latest incarnation of Microsoft's ubiquitous operating system

Well, it's official: 'good things come in small packages' is no longer just something you say to people under the height of 5ft 8in when they're feeling glum.

Now and again there are systems that come along that make you rethink what a PC is. There was a spate of such machines five years ago that challenged the notion of the desktop PC, but lacked the performance...

When you're choosing an all-purpose family PC at a reasonable price, you shouldn't expect leading-edge gaming performance

As if to prove that quad-core isn't just a paper launch, Evesham has built a cutting-edge performance system around it.

The annals of time are packed with occasions of questionable judgement. On a far, far smaller scale in terms of international gravitas, there were also some questionable decisions made when this Maxdata midrange PC was constructed

We've come a long way since Henry Ford. It's a sign of our choice driven times that Apple is no longer even offering a standard configuration for the Mac Pro, the machine that replaces the long-standing Power Mac brand.

When you're choosing a video- and photo-editing PC, a large case probably isn't high on your list of priorities. Yet the Zoostorm's bulk does have its advantages, such as five drive bays which makes it easy to add more hard drives

The Aries PowerXS is one of those PCs that makes an immediate impression, thanks to its stylish, brushed aluminium case. The heavy metal door at the front gives a feeling of quality, although it does have one or two practical issues