The low performance scores of the X300 can be blamed on the fact that it was released in the first quarter of last year. But it still carries a pretty high price tag of Rs. 1,27,000 (US$2,556). Overall, though the Lenovo ThinkPad X300 is a very good portable companion if you can afford to overlook its below-par performance and price.

MSI PR201

The MSI PR201 is a well-built laptop with a solid feel. It has a plain black matte plastic exterior while the inside consists of a black keyboard and silver finishing. It has a 12.1-inch screen which disappointed us. Not only is the screen very dull, but the brightness is uneven leading to faint white splotches on the screen. It has a number of ports for connectivity including one for HDMI and three for USBs and it also sports a DVD combo drive. Among its other features are a fingerprint scanner, draft-N wireless support and a button for switching on Wi-Fi. a 2mP integrated webcam is located at the top of the screen. Its keyboard is nothing to write home about and we felt that the PR201's touchpad was a little too small for convenience at 2.1 kg, the PR201 packs a few extra pounds and is far too heavy for an ultraportable device.

However, its portability factor is increased thanks to a frugal appetite for power and a good battery which lasted for all of 306 minutes in our tests. Under its hood, the PR201 has a 2.2Ghz Core 2 Duo P8400 processor coupled with 2GB of Ram and a 250GB hard disk. Thanks to these, the PR201 came up with a good performance in our benchmarking tests. In World Bench 6, the laptop scored 88 marks while in Cinebench's CPU test it scored 4674 points, lagging behind only the Asus U6s. It managed 18 fps in both our gaming benchmarks. Its speakers were of good quality and produced clear, albeit low, music. The MSI PR201 is priced at Rs. 52,000 which is a great price. However, the low price-tag is not enough to make this laptop truly shine and cover up some of its flaws including a poor display and not-so light build.

Apple MacBook