Dell Precision M6800

The Precision M6800 is Dell's biggest and most powerful business notebook
, which means a high price – this £2,075 around US$3,490, AU$3,750
machine is twice as pricey as some of its rivals. That's expensive, but
 Dell has packed this laptop with every feature a professional will
need on the road.

Every aspect of the M6800's design speaks to its business credentials.
The chassis is built from aluminium and magnesium alloy, and build
 quality is top-notch: there's no give on any surface. Dell has also
tested this machine using MIL-STD-810G protocols, so it's resistant
 to dust and works in extreme temperatures.

It's versatile, too. There are four USB 3.0 ports, D-SUB, HDMI
 and DisplayPort outputs, two audio jacks, an Ethernet socket
and an SDXC card slot, and it's also got rarer additions:
ExpressCard, eSATA and Smart Card slots, a docking station
connector, a hot-swappable hard disk and a physical Wi-Fi switch.

This is a work laptop, so it also has a trackpoint in the middle
of the keyboard with three discrete buttons.

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Acer Aspire E1

 Acer has proved with past Aspire notebooks, not to mention its impressive
Chromebooks, that budget can be beautiful when it comes to laptops.
 And the Acer Aspire E1 does have plenty going for it in addition to its flaws.

The E1 bears comparing to some of its contemporaries, but it's more
 expensive than the Toshiba Satellite S50D and lacks the draw of the
Lenovo IdeaPad Flex 14's rotating hinge.

So, the question is: can a friendly price, solid performance and
 adequate features make up for a couple of glaring flaws that
can make even simple tasks – like browsing the internet or
 reading a document.

It's necessary to mention this now, because it just might be a deal
 breaker, no matter what else the E1 has to offer. The trackpad is
responsive enough when it comes to the most simple task: moving
 the cursor around. But when it comes to doing anything else,
the surface falls well short, despite its pleasant texture.

Using two fingers to scroll is terribly finicky, with the pad either
 not recognizing what you're trying to do or actually somehow
registering a lengthy scroll in the wrong direction. It's bad enough
 that you may find yourself simply using the arrow keys to scroll,
 like it's 1999, or even manually grabbing the scroll bar with
the mouse pointer – like some kind of barbarian.

Even worse, depending on what you're used to, the Aspire
E1's mouse button is downright archaic. The single bar along
 the trackpad is actually divided into two buttons though you
 can't tell from looking at it, and astonishingly there's about
an inch in the middle that doesn't click at all.

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Toshiba Satellite S50D-A-10G

Toshiba is a reliable choice if you're looking for a solid mid-range laptop,
and the S50D-A-10G aims to continue that tradition with a tempting price
 of £480 -around US$820, AUD$870. At this end of the market, there's an
 interesting battle going on between Intel and AMD: while many systems still
make do with Intel Core-branded chips, more than ever rely on AMD's APUs.

The S50D is one such machine. It's powered by an A10-5745M, which is
 the most potent APU that AMD currently puts inside laptops.
 It's got four cores, and each of those uses the Piledriver architecture –

 the same design that's found inside AMD's full-fat desktop processors.

Those four cores run at 2.1GHz, and they'll hit a peak of 2.9GHz using
 Turbo mode. APUs usually impress thanks to integrated Radeon graphics
 cores, but Toshiba has gone one step further with this machine: instead
 of relying on the Radeon HD 8610G core, it's fitted an HD 8550M
discrete GPU.

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