Lab

Business PCs and notebooks

This month, we've taken a selection of desktop and mobile machines from all the big names and investigated all these aspects to make your decision that much easier. We asked Acer, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, IBM, NEC, Sony and Toshiba to send in their latest business machines - some of which will only just be available by the time you read this.

We put some constraints on the entries. For PCs, we set a price limit of £1,000 and required that a 17in TFT and Windows XP Professional be included. The same was true for the notebooks, except for the TFT. Here, we specified a 14.1in TFT with a 1,024 x 768 resolution. However, you'll note from the feature table on p118 that NEC and Fujitsu Siemens provided 15in TFTs. They suffer for this in the portability stakes - in terms of both bulk and weight. Dell's Latitude D610 has the right size TFT, but is available only with a resolution of 1,400 x 1,050.

On the two feature tables, we've included figures from our recent Service & Reliability survey. Using data from the 13,000 PC Pro readers who took part, these give an at-a-glance appraisal of how satisfied respondents were with each firm's ordering and delivery process, how reliable its system has been and how likely they are to buy from the same manufacturer again. It's this unbiased advice that helps you to determine exactly what to expect.

We've also gone to the trouble of tracking down (where available) typical costs for services such as on-site installation, network configuration and upgrades to standard warranties. Obviously, this is easier with companies that sell direct such as Dell and NEC - and you're more likely to receive a discount for bulk orders as well.

For the other manufacturers, we've scoured the Internet to find the lowest system unit prices and, more often than not, the extra services aren't available at all. If you need a special disk image, or on-site installation, you may have to find an alternative reseller to the one listed.

As the desktop PCs are likely to be located next to users on their desks, we also sent them to a dedicated test centre to discover exactly how noisy they are - you can see the results on p104. Thankfully, every machine was surprisingly quiet and shouldn't be audible over the background office noise.

How we work out the ratings

At the bottom of each review, there are four star ratings: one for Performance, another for Features & Design, a third for Value for Money and a final Overall rating. We don't just pluck these figures out of the air: they're calculated using a complex mixture of benchmark results, objective scores and subjective quality ratings.

For performance, we use our usual suite of 2D applications. The tests are based on everyday applications like Microsoft Word and Excel to more CPU-intensive chores such as video encoding and MP3 creation. To see more details of these tests, and for an at-a-glance guide to how each system performed, turn to p104.

The Features & Design score is calculated using a huge array of scores that we give to each machine, based on objective measurements such as the number of ports and interfaces, as well as components such as optical drives and the hard disk capacity. Security measures also receive points, while software - especially management apps - is appropriately rewarded too. For the notebooks, wireless technologies, card readers and expandability are scrutinised as well.

Warranty is given more weighting thanÊusual, since it's important to minimise any downtime. We prefer on-site cover and highly reward warranties that include next-business-day response as standard.

The Features & Design rating also includes some subjective scores, which are decided upon by a panel of judges; this helps to overcome any bias resulting from one person's taste. The subjective scores cover all those items that can't be measured objectively, such as the quality of the screen, keyboard and design of the chassis. Ease of maintenance - particularly for the PCs - is especially important. Finally, for the laptops, battery life is extensively tested, and you can see how long you can expect each to last on p104.

Our Value for Money rating is based on a weighted average of the Performance and Features & Design scores; we then factor in exactly how much each PC costs (including delivery) to give a 'bang-per-buck' result.

The Overall rating is an average of the Performance, Features & Design and Value for Money scores. The Labs Winner award goes to the system with the best overall score and a Recommended award is given to the runner-up.