What can I say. It's come a long way sice I remember the old 'eMachines'. I have to say that in terms of desktops, I have no problems with Acer. The Aspire T180 was at first quite surprised, I was surprised to find a 5.1 channel audio card, I was surprised at the built-in graphics, and I was very surprised with the dual core processor that some of the later Vist models come with.

To be honest, Acer have done quite well, because they sell computers very cheaply, and with my experience of Acer laptops, the price is reflected by the quality of the goods, but this isn't the case with the T180. The T180 is friendly enough to be a perfect home PC, powerful enough to be an office PC, cheap enough to just be used as a standalone server.

Interms of expandability, again, no complaints. I've been able to add an extra 2 GB of ram and install a PCI Video capturing card. So why did I need more ram? Well, it's not really Acer's fault, but the tasks I was carrying out, and the speed I expect to do them at, were not quite good enough, but for most people (or those who dont use their home PC as an FTP client for corporate web design) a RAM upgrade for the Acer T180, really isn't necessary. Now I'm trying to be as fair as possible, and I have to say just one thing, If you buy an Acer aspire T180, Vista is not the best option, however, this can be said about any computer (Laptop or desktop) that has less than 2GB of RAM and anything less than a 2GHz dual core processor.

Toshiba have just sent us first ultra portable netbook for us to review and it looks very promising. I consider Toshiba to be one of the best producers of laptops in terms of performance for price and the NB 100 is no different. We'll be reviewing the NB100-12A which is equipped with windows XP home edition, 1GB RAM and a 120GB hard drive.

Let me firstly say that this model runs windows XP home beautifully, it's 1GB RAM and intel atom processor is well capable of running every day applications like mail clients and internet explorers with ease and the on board graphics are fully capable of watching movies and videos beautifully, but the lack of a CD Drive, means we can't test it's performance in graphics intensive games. We did manage to test the netbook running more demanding programs like photoshop and macromedia flash, which it ran smoothly and without fail.