Our continually updated list of all the best laptops available today. Now that Windows 8 has arrived, Ultrabooks are taking off in popularity and laptop-tablet hybrids are beginning to be released more and more, choosing the right laptop for you can be even more confusing than ever. Cheap laptops are more powerful and capable than before, while high-end devices are often perfectly good replacements for your desktop computer, able to cope with more intensive programs. Those after a fast boot up time and a lightweight machine to carry might drool over an Ultrabook. Serious gamers [...]

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ASUS’s G-series has been warming the laps of gamers for a while, whether it’s the smart G74 or the elder statesman G73JH. The newest splinter of the G-team, however, is the G55 line. Right now, it’s the G55VW-DS71 that’s just had its specifications splayed out for all to see. It’ll be a quad-core i7-3610QM Ivy Bridge chip calling the shots, with a 2GB NVIDIA GTX 660M providing graphical backup. A solid 12GB of DDR3, 1,333MHz RAM and a 750GB HDD will come with the configuration mentioned here. There are two drive bays, though, so you can set it up to your liking, and [...]

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We know Ivy Bridge is close to landing, but when damn it, when? Until we know for sure, what about these new notebooks from HP that sneaked out with barely a flicker of ballyhoo. There are four new Pavilions on their way, the dv4-5000, dv6-7000, dv7-6000 and g4-2000. All of them are getting the Ivy Bridge treatment bar the g4, which sticks with Sandy Bridge. The dv4 and dv6 both sport 2.3GHz i7-3610QM processors, GeForce GT630M graphics, Beats Audio and 14-inch or 15.6-inch (1366 x 768) displays respectively. The dv7 model steps things up with a 2.6GHZ i7-3720QM chip, GeForce GT 650M graphics [...]

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The 13-inch laptop has gone on leaps and bounds recently, thanks massively to Intel’s Ultrabook specifications. At the moment, all Ultrabooks feature 13-inch screens, with 14 and 15-inch models incoming later this year. In many ways, a 13-inch laptop is the perfect size for a portable PC; they’re not as fiddly and squint-inducing as netbooks, but not as heavy and awkward as a full-on notebook. The price of these machines is higher than netbooks though, so if your wallet’s feeling the strain we recommend you take a look at our guide to the 15 best netbooks in the world today. 1. [...]

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While Toshiba’s stateside reps had us convinced its 14-inch Ultrabook wouldn’t see the light of day until sometime in June, that message of withholding apparently didn’t make it Down Under. Outed by its Australian arm today, that would-be Portege is actually the company’s Satellite U840. We already knew the electronics giant had intended on shuffling this Windows 7 machine out under that brand umbrella back at CES, but now we have a $1,500 AUD (about $1,608 USD) price tag to go with a list of confirmed specs. Officially on deck for this aluminum-bodied laptop are an Intel [...]

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This year’s laptops are set to be all about one word: Ultrabooks. The term Ultrabook is actually pure marketing, dreamt up by Intel for a new generation of portable PCs featuring its technology. Like Centrino but unlike Viiv, it’s starting to stick as a catch-all term for thin and light laptops, or ultraportables as they’re sometimes classified. The best way to think of an Ultrabook is a MacBook Air that isn’t made by Apple, a netbook that isn’t underpowered or a laptop that’s been on a crash diet. Ultrabooks all feature a Core i3, i5 or i7 processor, plus fast [...]

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You have all heard of National Brand laptop’s on the market today; such as Alienware/Dell, HP, Toshiba, Compaq and Sony. It may be surprising but none of these companies actually manufacture their own laptop’s. These National Brand companies purchase their laptops from an ODM (Original Design Manufacturer) such as Clevo, Compal, Asus, MSI, Quanta, Wistron, Mitac, Arima and Inventec. The ODM’s design & manufacture the machine and sell it to these National Brand companies as a barebones system. The National Brand companies then customize the system with a Processors, Hard Drives, [...]

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Best gaming laptop: 8 reviewed Is the golden era of laptop gaming a goner? Let’s consider the past a second. Wind the clock way back to September 2005 and Nvidia had just launched the GeForce 7800 GTX Go. It was a big, bad 24-pipe beast. What’s more, the mobile and desktop iterations were absolutely identical, save for a small gap in clockspeeds. Finally, mobile machines could go toe to toe with their desk-bound buddies. Sadly, it was but a temporary anomaly. Nvidia did manage a follow up with the closely related 7900 series but since then, there hasn’t been a pukka mobile graphics [...]

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Overview The Asus Zenbook UX31 is one of the first laptops to conform to Intel’s Ultrabook specification. And, right away, we’ll tell you – it stands toe-to-toe with Apple’s MacBook Air in the fight for the title of best luxury ultraportable. More competition is to come, however, in the form of the Lenovo IdeaPad U300 S, Acer Aspire S3 and, potentially, others from the likes of HP and Dell. Back to the present though and Asus has done a terrific job with the Zenbook’s design – even if you have to acknowledge that the designer took more than a sneaky glance at [...]

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Top 10 Gaming Laptops – September 2011 This list is based on actual or estimated gaming performance, factoring in the hardware specification (particularly the graphics card) relative to the laptop’s size. September Update: When buying a gaming laptop now–in Q3 2011–it should definitely be built around a 2nd-generation Core processor from Intel (Sandy Bridge). These CPUs are built with a 32nm manufacturing process and offer the best overall performance as well as the best performance per Watt. AMD machines based on the new A8 Fusion APUs are also an interesting alternative for gamers on [...]

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