It's easy to be seduced by the every larger, and more complicated, speeds and model numbers of processors and graphics cards, but they don't tell the whole story about performance, especially when it comes to notebooks.

The hard disk also has a very important role to play, even more so these days, given the constant indexing and virus checking that goes on.

This was brought home rather firmly when moving from a high end gaming desktop computer to a notebook. The notebook is still very powerful with dual SLI Geforce 7000 series graphics card and a very big screen. The official name is the Emperor, but it's been dubbed the Beast instead in the office, and I would have thought it was ideal for gaming.

Which it is, so long as games don't require lots of disk access. Playing F.E.A.R has become an exercise in patience as there are slight pauses when the disk is accessed. And this is on Windows XP rather than Vista.

This does highlight one of the biggest handicaps notebooks face against desktops, the relative performance of their smaller hard disks. Just to make the comparison worse, the desktop computer I had been using had two hard disks working together with RAID, improving the performance even further.

Worth considering when buying a new computer if gaming is important .