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The Centrino mobile brand is one of Intel’s major success stories of the last few years

Parents have full control of what their children do with the laptop with PeeWee's proprietary security suite. This allows parents to limit on a daily or weekly basis how much time their children surf the Internet or play computer games along with even blocking specific sites on any browser.

The display is still a big power user, and other components like the input peripherals and wifi radio will need a little power too, but with everything else in the system shut off and replaced with a single super-efficient chip, running a laptop in Latitude ON mode could more than triple its HP laptop battery life. With Dell quoting up to 19 hours of battery life on some of these new models, you could run Latitude ON for days without recharging.

"The more advanced smartphones become, the more people rely on their phone and the more pressure is put on the battery," said Dr Chris Byrne, head of operations and strategy at Ravensoft in the UK.

The principle is simple enough: whether a PC, notebook or peripheral, we ask who you bought your IT equipment from and then dig deeper. How satisfied were you with reliability? How satisfied were you with customer support? For a general customer satisfaction score we ask the killer question, ‘Would you buy a product from the same company again?’ and factor in respondents’ perceptions of ‘value for money’ if pertinent to that category.

The 10in screen shares the same 1024 x 600 resolution as the Wind, and there’s generally not much to choose between them. The display is both clear and sharp, with ample brightness and a surface that shows up equally well in dark and brightly lit environments. The 1.3-megapixel webcam sits in the frame above it, and the lid is just as sturdy as the 901’s, and just as bland to look at – where are all the colours we were originally promised?

Aimed at consumers, the Revo has a compact chassis that can attach to the back of a monitor. It can be fitted with a Sata hard drive or Flash solid state drive and up to 4GB of memory.

And despite the fact that the Fujitsu was at least $2,000 more expensive than the Eee, it still suffered the same problems as cheaper laptops - specifically, performance and HP DV2300 Battery life. The Q2010 was slow to startup, and while it coped adequately with Vista, it wasn't particularly responsive. Without the extended battery I carried with me, I would have run out of power a few times.

Sure, the EeePC is drastically underpowered compared to more expensive notebooks like the Fujitsu, and there's only 4GB of storage. But do the added specs add up to a drastically different experience?

Early reports suggest that the fire was caused by the lithium-iron HP laptop battery overheating. There have been increasing reports of fires from this type of battery, usually affecting laptops.

With the capacity of flash-based MP3 players now up to 8GB, they’re no longer the lesser cousin of hard disk models. In fact, with their diminutive size and absence of moving parts, flash-based players arguably represent the better deal. With no hard disk to jog, they’re ideal for exercise, and as flash memory requires little power in operation, battery life is most often counted in tens of hours.

The Centrino mobile brand is one of Intel’s major success stories of the last few years, and it’s had constant updates to keep pace with technology since its introduction in 2003. This latest revision is one of the most comprehensive yet. As ever, the new Centrino – technically Centrino Duo with its dual-core processor – comprises three modules, all of which need to be present for a notebook to qualify for the official Centrino label. The three modules in question are the processor, chipset and wireless module.

The changes may be relatively subtle, but the new Eee PC 900 is clearly an improvement on the old 701 design. The major change is the larger 8.9in screen, which is not only a better fit for Windows, but has a higher 1024 x 600 resolution (one of the major annoyances with the original version).