The Fujitsu Siemens Lifebook B-2154 is the smallest of the sub-notebooks featured here, by quite a margin. It's almost a hand-held, in fact, a legacy of the company's forays into industrial stock-checking systems and suchlike. Despite this, it has an internal V.90 modem and an internal 10/100Mbps LAN adapter. The build quality is of a superior standard with a solid, magnesium alloy lid that protects the screen from damage.

Because of its small size, the problem of where to put the I/O ports has been solved by the inclusion of a tiny, 125g port replicator, which is included as a standard part of the package. This provides parallel and nine-pin serial ports, along with a pair of PS/2 ports for a mouse and keyboard, and it also provides you with the only means of hooking up the external floppy drive module, since this cannot be plugged directly into the notebook. The external CD-ROM drive connects via a PC Card, which fits into the machine's single Type II slot.

The 10.4-inch touch screen is intended for use with the supplied stylus, which clips neatly and securely into a recess in the screen surround. The screen itself is powered by a 2.5MB Trident Cyber 95225DVD chip that gives the screen a lowly 800 x 600 pixels resolution.

Powered by a Celeron 450MHz chip and coming with the standard base memory of 64MB of RAM, performance is fairly average, as you would expect, but still good enough for most of today's business applications. The 6GB hard disk comes with Windows 2000 preinstalled and you get MS Works 2000 as the bundled software package.

Although performance isn't its strong point, the LifeBook B-2154's weight and size make it a useful tool for people constantly on the move.

Fujitsu Siemens - LifeBook B-2154 price

£1,538 + VAT

Fujitsu Siemens: 01344 475555