Dual-core Centrino appears everywhere

Was it worth all the fuss? Certainly. The new Core Duo based laptops give out more performance and in many cases, with even more battery life. Anand was keen to emphasise the fact that all variables were kept constant during the test and only the chipset and the CPU were changed. The Lenovo laptop on the other hand was just as impressive as the rest of the Thinkpad stable; with all the bells and whistles that you can expect from a tier-1 manufacturer.

Intel has a had major weak spot for the next two years. If you want to know what it is, you will have to read on at Arstechnica's. AMD is aiming right at it apparently. No it has nothing to do with Rambus or the fact that AMD may take the AMD Inside slogan onboard. It has everything to do with the CPU though.

Trusted Reviews tests the first Dual Core Laptop featuring the Sonoma platform to come to the UK. The Acer Travelmate 82004WLMi comes with Yonah Inside. It might seem to be expensive but for what it comes with, there is little to say that this lad offers fantastic value for money - especially if you are after a top-end notebook. It weighs just under 3KG but packs 2GB Ram, a 120GB hard disk, a huge 1680x1050 pixel widescreen, a 256MB X1600 GPU from ATI and the whole range of wireless connections that you should have on a lappy.

More Yonah coming up but this time in the form of a test of the Pentium M T2600, in other words, the CPU itself. The beast features 151 million transistors, a 2.16GHz speed, 2MB L2 cache and a 667FSB, obscenely enough to power your mundane tasks. In benchmarks, it is compared with the likes of the Pentium XE 840 and the Athlon x2 4400+ and it has to be said that it is competitive with both desktop CPU most of the time. Now if the notebook CPU can achieve so much, what about the desktop version then.

Still in the laptop realm, Via Arena checked the new C7M- processor using a Twinhead notebook. Rather some kind of marketing literature rather than a fully blown review. Good though to see that Twinhead might be having a coming back - they did produce laptops a decade ago and AFAIR, they are still in the ODM/OEM business. Anyway, see Via's Simply Mobile catchphrase in motion as Via Arena talks about VIA's padlock, coolstream, power saver and twin turbo technology.

Newcomer Gaming Groove checks some cool mice ranging from the cheap IOgear laser mouse to the Razer Copperhead. Microsoft and logitech are also included. They go into the details of each mouse and yes, there is a winner. The first one costs only $30 so don't expect that much. The Logitech G5 is the overall winner and comes with innovative stuff like a customizable weight system and adaptable USB polling rate. µ