DL75

The Mitac DL75 is a competitively priced notebook, which offers a big screen, decent connectivity and acceptable performance. It's a 15.4in widescreen notebook and weighs 3kg without the power supply. Standard hotkeys for Web and e-mail are provided at the top of the key-board, along with dedicated multimedia keys on the front panel. These work as part of an "instant on" media player, which will only play music CDs since there is no monitor output and your hard drive is not accessible. The sound from the speakers is of average quality.

One interesting aspect of the DL75 is the trackpad, which is incorporated into the main chassis, rather than being an inset on the body. This looks good, but my hand tended to slide across when typing. The drawback is it often repositioned the cursor where I didn't want it.

Connectivity is ample, with Wi-Fi 802.11a/b/g, a 3-in-1 media card reader, three USB 2.0 ports, S-Video out, VGA out and FireWire connections - Bluetooth is the only notable omission.

The widescreen LCD is impressive, with 1280x800 resolution, a glossy finish and a decent viewing angle. The contrast is lacking a little in games, but it's nothing a bit of gamma correction won't fix.

Performance wise, it registered 77 in PC WorldBench 5, which is decent for an $1800 notebook running an Intel Pentium M 1.73 processor with 1GB RAM.

Understandably, in this price range 3-D performance is low. Using the integrated Intel graphics card it scored 4603 in 3DMark 2001SE. However, this score compares well against similarly configured notebooks we have seen. Its battery life was pleasing, as it ran for 224min in MobileMark 2002.