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My first contestant belongs in the third category, being a 15.4in widescreen, 3kg model with a decent mid-range specification. The Rock Pegasus 665 T7200 has a 2GHz Core 2 Duo T7200, a 256MB GeForce Go 7600, and a 100GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive. That’s all fairly basic by desktop PC standards, but I had high hopes of getting some respectable gaming from this spec.

I did, but there were some drawbacks that we didn’t anticipate. In actual fact, some of these have nothing to do with speeds and specs, and everything to do the physical form factor. Most PC games are still played with mouse and keyboard, and while using a USB mouse is a no-brainer – who in their right mind would try to play Battlefield 2142 with a touchpad? – getting used to playing with an unfamiliar and slightly cramped keyboard layout isn’t as easy as you might imagine. Hitting the Fn key instead of the Ctrl key was a surprisingly regular occurrence.

Secondly, the screen takes some getting used to. For one thing, it sits lower to the desk than a conventional monitor, and for another this particular screen – with its glossy X-Glass coating – proved particularly prone to reflections, meaning that sunlight coming through nearby windows made gaming an impossibility without the blinds fully closed. This isn’t a problem if you play games in the most atmospheric ambiance – a darkened room – but it can be if you have to share your living space with other people. Finally, as more and more of us are finding out, not all games are widescreen-friendly. All but one of the games we tried supported the panel’s 1,280 x 800 native resolution, but Battlefield 2142 still doesn’t properly support widescreen play. A number of other games, particularly those using the Doom 3 engine, require command line fixes or patches/wrappers to run.