As notebook computers continue to creep into our everyday lives, so is the need for more lifestyle-orientated designs.

If you've got a notebook that can play, pause and record live TV, while acting as the central hub for your digital media collection, you're going to want these 21st century features to be reflected in the look and feel of your portable computer.

While the Ultinote D6000 doesn't carry the flair and elegance of a Sony Vaio or Apple Macbook, it packs a lot of power into an appealing chassis.

The 15.4in screen and 3cm height keep the overall dimensions down, and at 3.45kg it's not exactly weighty. Granted, we've seen smaller and lighter but not many of these house the kind of hardware found inside the Ultinote D6000.

For starters there's an Intel Core Duo T2500 processor, which sports two cores each with a clock speed of 2GHz. The T2500 processor also includes 2MB of L2 cache and a 677MHz FSB.

With 1GB of DDR2 Ram pushing things along, the Ultinote D6000 managed a PCmark05 score of 3,993. It's not the best we've seen but still very respectable considering its size and weight.

Its result in Sysmark 2004 SE told a similar story. Achieving 202, it sits in the top ten of notebooks we've tested where Sysmark is concerned.

On the gaming front, Hi-Grade has opted to fit a 256MB ATI Radeon Mobility X1600 chip. At the notebook's native screen resolution of 1,280 x 800, it managed 3,474 in 3Dmark05 and 49.33fps (frames per second) in Far Cry.

When the resolution was reduced to 800 x 600, the figures jumped up slightly to 3,881 and 55.24fps in 3Dmark05 and Far Cry respectively.

These scores indicate the Ultinote D6000 is an all-round notebook that will be competent running most tasks without being a master in any.

Where we think the Ultinote D6000 really excels is with its features. It runs Microsoft Windows Media Center Edition (MCE) 2005, which means it will happily play all manner of video and audio, but unlike many other MCE notebooks we've seen Hi-Grade has fitted a digital TV tuner as standard. This allows the Ultinote D6000 to be Freeview-ready out of the box.

An eight-cell battery is included as standard, with a life of up to three hours. There's also a 100GB Serial-ATA hard disk for amassing a decent media collection and, of course, a multi-format DVD writer for archiving data and watching DVD movies.

There are also four USB2 ports dotted around the case for attaching peripherals, such as external hard disks should your media collection grow out of control.

Going back to the design, the Ultinote D6000 sports a silver-and-grey chassis with a glossy reflective lid and front lip.

Corners are rounded, the lid houses a 1.3megapixel camera while the meaty hinge should endure years of use before breaking. In short, this is a robust notebook.

Negative points are the small size of the trackpad and the heat generated underneath the notebook. You might want to consider investing in a notebook fan such as the Port Designs Coolfan.

As is par for the course these days, both 802.11g Wifi and Bluetooth are included, as is a memory card reader and the usual array of ports and sockets. Hi-Grade is also offering free delivery and two-year collect and return warranty.

Considering the low price tag, Hi-Grade has packed plenty of features into this versatile and reasonably portable notebook.

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