A shade away from winning itself a Gold award, the Notino C2400 from Hi-Grade is a very good thin-and-light notebook with very few flaws. It's fast and easy to carry, and has a good screen. What's more, it costs less than a grand.
The processing power is provided by a Pentium M 760 running at 2GHz, combined with 512MB of DDR RAM. The C2400 managed to score 85 points in our WorldBench 5 test suite, which is pretty good - although with more RAM we think it could have gone faster.
However, memory prices are sky-high at the moment, and 512MB is plenty to keep the C2400 running smoothly through most applications. An 80GB hard drive is just about as good as you'll get in a thin-and-light notebook and the Sony DW-56A DVD writer is a good model that will write to most formats, including DVD+R DL (dual layer).
The 14in widescreen might only stretch to a resolution of 1,280x768 but the image is sharp and the colours rich. The keyboard, however, is no better than adequate, and the notebook's overall look is a bit dated.
There's 802.11b/g and Bluetooth wireless facilities, plus three USB 2.0 ports, a mini-FireWire port, VGA and TV-out connectors.
If there's a major problem with the C2400, it's the battery life. Running for just over two-and-a-quarter hours in Mobile Mark, it's not going to last long when it's unplugged, which defeats the purpose of a thin-and-light notebook.
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