Acer Travelmate 3000

With a footprint smaller than the full-size edition of PCW and weighing just 1.45kg, the Acer Travelmate 3000 is designed with portability in mind.

Despite the compact size, there's a 12.1in widescreen display along with a reasonably-sized keyboard. You'll notice some flexibility to the keyboard when typing, but it's the cramped touchpad that's the biggest let-down, making it tricky to move the cursor around the screen quickly.

There are various versions of the Travelmate 3000 series; this being the 3004WTMi model. Its core components are impressive, with a 2GHz Intel Pentium M processor, 1GB of DDR2 memory and a 100GB hard disk.

It took just one hour and 40 minutes to drain the battery in our tests, but you may well get more than two hours using power saving settings. A second smaller battery is supplied that runs for just over an hour, but you can't hot-swap the two.

An external dual-layer DVD writer compensates for the lack of a built-in optical disc drive and connects to the notebook's single Firewire port. Wireless options come in the form of infrared, Bluetooth and 802.11b/g,and the four-in-one memory card reader is a useful inclusion.

The Travelmate's price tag and small size make it seem like the ideal travelling companion, but we expected to see longer battery life. Acer tries to combat this by including two batteries, but it's not an ideal solution.