HP Pavilion g6z

The HP Pavilion g6z starts at a wallet friendly $429.99 on HP.com and comes with an AMD Fusion processor that is geared towards being power and battery life friendly yet still offering ample performance for everyday tasks. The HP g6z we have under review comes with the base level AMD A4-3305M processor. It’s a pre-built configuration with model number g6-1d60us and was purchased from Staples.com for $380 during a sale event. For around $400 the g6z has a lot to like, though isn’t perfect of course, we’ll cover the ups and downs in this review.

Dell XPS 13 Ultrabook Coming next Week, User Manuals Available Now

We covered the unveiling of the Dell XPS 13 during CES 2012, which revealed some general information and specifications. But maybe you’re still looking for more details to help decide whether you want to throw a thousand bucks at Dell’s new XPS 13 Ultrabook? Well, it looks like you counted your lucky stars because several user manuals and documentation have found their way online a week before its release!

Asus Zenbook UX21E

The Asus Zenbook UX21E is a shiny example of the modern 11in ultraportable notebook.

Do you believe in love at first sight? That’s the question Asus poses in its marketing for theZenbook, an ultraportable very much in the mold that Intel promotes as ultrabook.
Which in turn means this is a Windows clone of the Apple MacBook Air. We’re starting to see plenty of these tributes now, yet the Asus Zenbook is simply the best so far.
That’s not because of any innovation here, mind. The similarity to the award-winning 11in MacBook Air is uncanny, from the all-metal high-grade clamshell construction, to the essentially identical dimensions in each direction, to the same battery capacity, same processor and same screen sizes and resolution.
The Asus Zenbook is available in two sizes, with a 11.6in or 13.3in display – although Asus' version of the latter is smaller than Apple's 13in, as it uses a narrower 16:9 aspect ratio display in place of the Air's 16:10 ratio.

Sony Vaio F Series

The good: With a Blu-ray drive, Nvidia GeForce 540M graphics, and a full 1080p resolution display, the Sony Vaio F Series is a full-featured movie and gaming machine, with a sharp look and useful preloaded software.
The bad: The 16-inch screen can sit uncomfortably between midsize and desktop replacement laptops, and the Sony price premium is nearly on par with Apple's. Plus, the battery life is disappointingly weak.
The bottom line: If the size is right for you, the Vaio F Series is a well-made high-end laptop, and is a good reminder that Sony is one of the few brands that comes close to Apple on design and polish.
Sony certainly makes distinctive-looking laptops. And in a market saturated with cookie-cutter grey boxes (or now, endless MacBook Air knockoffs), that's more important than it may seem at first. Even better, Sony also happens to make very good laptops, and I can probably count the number of real lemons found in the Sony Vaio line over the past five-plus years on the fingers of one hand.

Acer Aspire Ethos 5951G-2418G75Mnkk review

Also known as just the Ethos, the Acer 5951G does a good job when it comes to sound, with a license paid to Dolby for its Home Theater software to enhance audio playback.
The 15.6in glossy screen is a let-down, though. In terms of colour depth, it does a fine job, but we were disappointed to find a resolution of just 1366 x 768 pixels, which makes individual pixels visible to the eye. Nor is it high enough resolution to support 1080p HD video without downscaling.
This Acer Aspire Ethos 5951G-2418G75Mnkk laptop’s optical drive is CD/DVD only anyway, so if you’re looking for Blu-ray playback or high-definition video enjoyment, keep looking.
To top it off, the screen has a glossy finish, meaning that visibility is a problem outside of darkened rooms.

Sony VAIO S Series

The Sony VAIO S Series laptop won't win any awards for performance or multimedia playback, but it's a great light PC for a business professional.
The Sony VAIO S Series isn't the most powerful all-purpose laptop, but I like it - and not just because I have a soft spot for Sony. Although the VAIO S Series offers mediocre general performance and modest graphics speed, it's also light, thin, stylish, and very portable.
Our review model, priced at £999, sports an Intel Core i5-2430M processor, an AMD Radeon HD 6470M graphics card, and 4GB of RAM. It also has a 500GB hard drive, a DVD-RW optical drive, and built-in Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3.0. This model runs the 64-bit version of Windows 7 Home Premium.
In our WorldBench 6 benchmark tests, the VAIO S Series earned a score of 112. This is a decent, but not excellent, score that puts the VAIO S Series right around the middle of our recently tested mid- to power-priced laptops. While the VAIO S Series should be fine for most basic work tasks and streaming video, it's by no means a graphics powerhouse or a gaming laptop. See also: What's the best laptop?

HP EliteBook 8740w XT914UA

The HP EliteBook 8740w XT914UA is billed as a Mobile Workstation, but mobile is not the first word that springs to mind when you look at it.
It's absolutely huge, with a 17.3in display – and with a 16:10 aspect ratio rather than 16:9 – and despite HP's claims that the EliteBook 'only' weighs in at 3.57kg, that figure may be rather conservative. Our scales were quivering at around the 3.85kg mark.
And that's not where the hefty aspect of the HP EliteBook 8740w XT914UA ends - it will cost you around £3000 to get your hands on one of these, depending on configuration. But both build quality and specification are largely representative of a laptop at this price level.