How we tested

Every notebook has its USP. Some have looks while others have brains, and there are others who claim to have it all. What is more important than the other? In this shootout, we put 26 laptops to the grind to answer these questions for you.

First, we asked each manufacturer to send their the lowest priced and the most expensive and feature rich notebooks. These notebooks were then tested on our three-axis model of performance, price and features. Lastly, we used the Brown Gibson model to arrive at the weightages that were used in the calculations. Here, weightages were given according to the category that a laptop was in. For the lowest priced category, the buyer would be more concerned about the price, and less about features and performance. That's why price got a higher weightage than the other two. So, calculations for price were done out of 150, while features and performance were done out of 100 each, giving an overall score out of 350 points. 

For the most feature rich laptops, likewise, a buyer would be more concerned about the features and performance and less about the price. Therefore, price got a lower weightage here. So scores for price were calculated out of 50, while those for features and performance were out of 100 each, taking the maximum possible total score to 250. 

Performance Tests

In performance, we checked the laptops on how they fare in running regular office productivity applications, multimedia content creation applications, OpenGL and DirectX gaming, graphics performance and battery backup. The benchmarks used were Business Winstone 2002 and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 for judging the business and multimedia content creation performance. We used Quake III Arena to check for OpenGL gaming performance and 3DMark 2001 SE for DirectX graphics performance. 

The Features

We divided the features offered by the notebooks in five categories: physical, connectivity, components, software and convenience. In physical features, we considered the size, weight, thickness, heating, screen size and quality of the carry bag. Under connectivity, we considered all the extra ports that each laptop had besides the regular ones like LAN/modem, audio in/out, etc. We noticed that all laptops had these regular ports. So, the ports we looked for were serial, parallel, PS/2, memory card reader, S-Video, Irda, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, SPDIF, K-Lock and FireWire. We also checked for the number and type of USB ports (ver 1 or 2), and the number and type of PCMCIA slots. 

In components, we checked for the type of optical drive, and hard drive capacity in both categories, and for the cheapest one, we also checked for a floppy drive. Software is becoming an important differentiator in notebooks these days. That's why we considered the management features provided by each laptop, including recovery CDs, data recovery options, etc. Lastly, we considered the convenience features in each, such as how good was the trackpad and whether it had extra scroll
options. 

The pricing

Here, we considered two things, price and warranty offered by each laptop. We noticed several interesting trends in laptops. One is that you can today easily buy a laptop with a decent configuration well under Rs 60K. 

Most laptop manufacturers are also introducing Centrino based models in the market, which means they're all Wi-Fi ready. Lastly, prices are going down, and specs moving up in laptops. We hope that our reviews help you choose your dream laptop.