I've recently been to a conference in Amsterdam, XTech '06, and while there noticed a lot of notebook choices. Predictably mostly I saw Mac's but there were a few others of note.

Firstly I was made aware of the Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook series. Some of them are pretty nice notebooks, but there are a few issues. Firstly I have a very low opinion of the company, as history has provided me with many many failed Fujitsu Siemens hard disks - they seem to have a high failure rate, and so this puts me off the whole brand. The second problem is the specs.

The Lifebook Q 2010 is probably the closest to what I'm looking for, forgiving the Intel Core Solo CPU, but being an Intel based notebook it has an Intel integrated GFX, which sucks.

The Lifebook S 2110 is another reasonable choice that falls short. Sure its a nice AMD Turion based system with an ATI Radeon Xpress 220 series GFX chipset, much like the Avertec notebook, but it has a larger 13.3" screen, which isn't even widescreen, making it a fair bit bigger. The one key good point about both of these, though, is the good battery life.

Next notable notebook in my travels is the Sony VAIO SZ series, specifically the VAIO SZ1XP. The spec of this notebook is excellent - 1Gb RAM, 1.83Ghz Intel Core Duo CPU, GeForce Go 7400 128Mb GFX, 13.3" Widescreen laptop - with a 5.5 hour battery life and weighing in at a little over 1.5Kg. Not bad at all! Only one problem here, the price. I couldn't find it for less than about £1500.

Lastly, for now, I came across a new item about a new barebones notebook from Microstar (MSI). If you remember from my previous posts on the Avertec notebook, they use the Microstar MS-1013 for their 2100 series. Microstar have a new model to supersede that called the MS-1058. All in all its good - improving on the previous model with a better GFX implementation and supporting dual core Turions. This might be a good value DIY base.