Ultimate laptops for the rich and shameless

Round-up by: Rory Reid

Last updated: 02 Mar 2007

If you like your laptops to be both seen and heard, then this is the round-up for you. You won't find any of those minuscule ultraportables that can get lost down the back of a sofa here -- we're concentrating on all-singing, all-dancing, all-conquering laptops the size of a garden shed.

We'll start with the Dell XPS M2010, the laptop Dell calls the Showstopper, and for good reason. It's shaped like a briefcase when closed, has a 20-inch screen, a detachable keyboard and mouse, and plenty of top hardware on the inside. You get a 2.13GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of RAM, a pair of 100GB hard drives, and an ATI Radeon X1800 graphics card. We have some minor reservations about its build quality in places, but if there's something this laptop can't do, we'd like to hear about it. Check out our video of it in action.

If you can't handle 20 inches you may want to consider the 17-inch Sony Vaio VGN-AR11S -- the first laptop to ship with an integrated Blu-ray drive. We think it's arguably the finest Media Center laptop money can buy -- not only can it play Blu-ray movies but its high-resolution display has a native resolution of 1,920x1,200 pixels -- which is almost unheard of. It'll let you play 1080p movies on the laptop itself, or on your big-screen telly via HDMI. Our only gripe would be the fact it has some fiddly mouse buttons and an over-abundance of chrome, but apart from that it has our complete blessing.

Anyone with a spare £2,348 burning a hole in their Gucci wallet should take a gander at the Alienware Aurora mALX. It's an Alienware, so it's obviously aimed at gamers -- and how. Its 19-inch widescreen display doesn't support 1080p, but it has not one but two Nvidia GeForce 7900 GTX graphics cards running in tandem. There's not a game on Earth it won't chew up, spit out and stomp on.

Last, and least in the pricing stakes, is the Acer TravelMate 8204WLMi. It's comparatively cheap at £1,770, and has a fairly tacky-looking carbon fibre-esque lid, but it still packs a mean specification. A 2GHz Core 2 Duo CPU joins 1GB of RAM and an ATI Radeon X1600 graphics card, so it's a great all-rounder. The best thing about the 8204WLMI, however, is that it packs a Blu-ray drive so you can enjoy hi-def flicks. Oh, and it has a 15.4-inch screen so it's possible to lift it for longer than five minutes.