Where the Dell Chromebook 11 disappoints is the screen. The glossy finish is highly reflective, yet looks dull and flat. Vertical viewing angles aren’t great and there’s a touch of grain. Measuring performance with our colorimeter revealed the panel’s maximum brightness to be a disappointing 208cd/m2, and the contrast only 360:1. Such figures aren’t uncommon on budget laptops, but they’re a long way short of the screens we’re seeing on sub-£200 tablets these days.Perhaps more significantly, screen quality also falls well short of the HP Chromebook 11 – a machine previously withdrawn from sale for a while due to problems with faulty power supplies, but now back on Google Play at £229.Still, the Dell’s screen is similar to its closest rival, the Acer C720 – which is slightly brighter, but has worse contrast – and the rest of the package is superior to Acer’s offering. The Scrabble-style keyboard has a crisper, more solid feel and the broad touchpad is responsive; although we’ve never liked integrated buttons, its heavy, positive click is just about acceptable.

Build quality, as you’d hope from a product designed for the classroom, is excellent. The lid is stiff, its glossy front protecting the LCD beneath from heavy-handed prodding. A rubberised coating surrounds the keyboard and completely covers the wristrest, which makes for a comfortable touch-typing platform. Beneath the laptop are two long strips of rubber, which do a fine job of preventing the laptop from slipping around on a desk or your lap. Despite the solid feel, this isn’t a heavy machine, weighing a mere 1.3kg and measuring 23mm thick.With its strong performance, creditable ergonomics and low price, the Dell Chromebook 11 is a great option for any student looking for a budget workhorse – especially since, with the integration of the Quickoffice beta into the Chrome OS Files app, offline editing capabilities are now much stronger than before. At this cheaper end of the Chromebook market, we prefer it to the Acer C720.Now that the HP Chromebook 11 is back on sale, though, it’s that model that remains as our favourite Chromebook. Although it can’t compete with this Dell on performance or battery life, its display is vastly superior, and that makes a real difference.

This year marks the 70th birthday of Colossus, one of the most important machines in the history of IT. As well as being the world’s first "electronic” computer, it also played a pivotal role in helping to end World War II by deciphering coded German military messages.Colossus has achieved something of a cult status among computer nerds and historians alike, but could you name the world’s first laptop, tablet or games console? Or even the world’s first web server or the first computer with a mouse-driven graphical user interface?Davey Winder, PC Pro’s contributing editor and collector of vintage computers, uncovers the 13 most important pieces of computing hardware in history. Although Charles Babbage had envisaged a programmable computer 100 years earlier, it was in 1944 that the first fully programmable and electronic digital computer was realised in the shape of the aptly named Colossus.

Using vacuum tubes to perform Boolean operations, and requiring the physical manipulation of telephone jack plugs, cords and switches to change wiring in order to program it for new tasks, Colossus was designed by Tommy Flowers and influenced by Alan Turing’s crypto-analysis probability theories.In all, there were ten Colossus computers built, each occupying a large room and consisting of eight racks more than 2.3m in height, arranged in two bays that were 5.5m in length. A fully functional replica was completed in 2007 and can now be seen at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. Think video-gaming consoles and the names that spring to mind include Atari, Nintendo, Sega, Sony and Microsoft. However, none of these were responsible for kick-starting the home video-gaming revolution; that milestone belongs to the Magnavox Odyssey.Developed by Ralph Baer – who later designed the Simon game – and released in 1972 (pre-dating Atari consoles by a few years), the Odyssey sold over 300,000 units before it was discontinued in 1975.

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Designed for use with a TV, the games took the form of cartridges and required a plastic overlay to be taped to the screen. Tennis, football, hockey and roulette were all played by manipulating light using rudimentary controllers.A shooting gallery game introduced the world’s first gun controller in the form of a full-sized, pump-action shotgun, which detected light as a target.It may sound basic when compared with today’s consoles, but Atari was found guilty of patent infringement when it released its Pong game because it so closely resembled the Odyssey tennis game. Without the Odyssey, we wouldn’t see the likes of the Call of Duty or Grand Theft Auto franchises today. Most computer historians agree that the Xerox Alto was the first to combine a desktop graphical user interface (GUI) and Douglas Engelbart’s mouse input device in a meaningful way. Developed at Xerox PARC, the Alto was never commercially released, although thousands were built for use within Xerox facilities and by universities.It included a monochrome bit-mapped VDU, and came with a three-button mouse, a visual UI and 2.5MB of removable data storage.

The Alto pushed the GUI input concept into the output too, being the first to enable true wysiwyg printing, and was designed to work with the laser printers Xerox was developing at the time.The Alto changed the way users interacted with the computer and influenced the design of personal computing hardware, such as the Apple Macintosh, that followed. The Altair 8800 makes it onto our list on two counts: it was one of the first affordable home computer kits to hit the market; and it inspired future computing engineers and designers who went on to change the face of computing as we know it.Costing less than $400 (£250) at the time, the Altair was offered as a kit based on an eight-bit Intel 8080 CPU and a 256-byte memory. The display was nothing more than front-panel LEDs, and there was no keyboard either; input was via a collection of toggle switches.However, the open 100-line computer bus went on to become the de facto standard S-100 bus, and the first programming language written for the device, Altair BASIC, was created by none other than Paul Allen and Bill Gates, who shortly went on to form Microsoft.

HP’s been growing its range of AMD-powered Sleekbooks for some time, and it’s now the turn of its Pavilion TouchSmart 15 to take the spotlight. It's a laptop, you won't be surprised to discover, that boasts a 15in touchscreen as its main selling point.What's most impressive about the TouchSmart 15, though, is how much HP has managed to cram in for the money. There’s a generously proportioned 1TB hard disk, 8GB of RAM, and even a pair of USB 3 ports – something cheaper laptops often fail to include.At 2.51kg, this is no Ultrabook, but there’s a healthy splash of style. The rounded edges and smooth curves are pleasingly understated, and the decision to do away with the optical drive helps keep the chassis slim. Look closer still and you’ll see the gloss black plastics are impregnated with sparkly silver flecks, sealed just beneath the surface. Underneath the HP’s glittery exterior lies AMD’s 1.9GHz A4-4355M APU. In terms of application performance, it’s markedly slower than Intel-powered rivals - a result of 0.38 in our benchmarks puts it some way behind budget laptops equipped with low-voltage Core i3 processors, such as theSony VAIO Fit 15E or the Dell Inspiron 15R.

Graphics performance is a little more heartening. The Radeon HD 7400G graphics core delivered a playable 37fps in our Low quality Crysis test – enough to put the HP just ahead of its Intel-powered competitors.The HP’s uneven performance continues in other areas. It lasted a mere 4hrs 7mins in our light-use battery test, and we don’t particularly like the keyboard. A bouncy base and short-travel keys means it isn’t the most pleasant to type on, and the touchpad beneath is nothing special, either. Crucially, though, it's the HP's 15.6in touchscreen that's most disappointing. Brightness topped out at a dim 175cd/m², and images appeared dull and under-saturated even by budget laptop standards. Colour accuracy is woeful, too, and left our test photographs looking tinted and unnatural.At only £449, the HP's 1TB hard disk and 8GB of memory make it look like a great deal, but we're not convinced. While touch-enabled rivals such as the Sony VAIO Fit 15E cost more, we'd advise it's a price worth paying for a more balanced package.It's not often the torture testing behind the latest laptops is laid bare for the world to see but, at HP's Global Influencers Summit in Shanghai, the firm showed off a selection of its toughest testing kit -- as well as some impressive statistics about the stresses and strains its devices experience during the design process.

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"All of our EliteBook products are put through military spec 810G testing," explained Carol Hess, HP’s vice president for worldwide commercial PC marketing. That includes the new EliteBook Folio, and that means an extremely strenuous workout for a humble notebook. She said HP uses eight of the 810G standards benchmarks, including tests that measure for heat, cold, humidity and dust resistance as well as a laptop’s ability to handle vibrations and drops. "We drop [laptops] about 30 inches from a table, 26 times on each side of the unit.”Scott Lowe, an engineer from HP's Houston development centre -- and owner of spectacular facial hair -- unveiled a handset designed to hit computing equipment with thousands of volts of electrostatic charge. "We use this tool to generate several thousand volts," said Lowe, "and we test many places on the computer -- the touchpad, keyboard, connecters, the edge of the LCD." Lowe doesn't just stop at a quick spark: "we test to 8,000 and 15,000 volts, and we do 115,000 hours of testing" across the entire design cycle of a desktop or laptop PC.

Wayne Chen, a testing engineer from HP's Taiwan development centre, then talked the audience through some of his favourite robots. One is a large metal arm that opens and closes four notebooks at once. Chen said that "we run it for 25,000 cycles, the equivalent of ten times a day for seven years," and HP builds its hinges from magnesium alloy with hardened steel pins that Lowe claimed "last virtually forever”.That's not the only robot HP uses to test its laptops. Chen explained that "the latch can be a very complex mechanical design," and one of his machines uses a three-stage mechanism to open and close the latches on the latest laptops to ensure smooth operation.It's a neat machine and, like the hinge testing robot, goes through 25,000 cycles on a new design. Keyboards, meanwhile, are tested for "up to ten million keystrokes, which is seven years of typical use". The biggest machines in the room, though, were two chambers -- one designed to simulate high heat levels and another that can produce extreme cold. HP tests through "the entire operation spectrum", with laptops on show in Shanghai operational at 0 and 35 degrees Celsius. Laptops are also turned off and subjected to wider variation in temperature, with low and high points of -20 degrees and 60 degrees Celsius mentioned by Lowe.These tests are conducted through the design phase of a new notebook rather than performed on each machine that comes off the production line, but it's obvious that plenty of work goes into finding faults and determining which machines will stand the test of time.

1. http://www.blogstuff.co.uk/folgenden/
2. http://www.birdwatch.co.uk/blogs/blogShow.asp?blog=566
3. http://www.nichtraucher-blogs.de/blogs/akkusmarkt/
4. http://www.rondeetjolie.com/blog/akkusmarkt.html

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