We have to admit that the new Versa C150 came as something of a surprise. It's essentially an all-purpose business laptop and to be honest that's not usually the sort of machine that makes a distinct impression - unless it's a bad one.

So when we picked the Versa C150 up and found ourselves thinking 'good, rounded corners and bevelled edges, intelligent design, very bash-resistant,' we weren't really expecting the next reaction. Which was that we rather liked the look and feel of the thing and hadn't even opened the lid yet.

When we did, we were treated to the rest of the design, which is modern, eye-catching and practical all at once. The case is finished in a harmonious mix of metallic grey and silver and most of the upper surface is covered by a solid layer of transparent plastic several millimetres thick.

It's this top layer that gives the notebook much of its individualistic appearance. The majority of Versa C150s might be destined for fairly mundane working lives, but NEC has still gone to the trouble of making it stand out from the pack, which deserves praise.

Like most general purpose portables, the Versa is manageable, but not particularly light. It weighs in at 3.15kg, but you get everything in one box. The Versa has a fixed floppy drive and comes with a choice of fixed optical drives, in this case the top of the line CD-RW/DVD combo unit which plays CDs and DVDs at 24x and 8x respectively, and delivers the R/RW bit at 16x/10x.

Despite the three-spindle design it's not an especially large machine, with a fairly typical 330mm x 270mm footprint, and a lid-shut thickness of 36mm, comfortably under the 40mm crossover point into slab land.

Overall, the build quality is good. In addition to the aforementioned rounded edges and corners, the case is free of any obvious weak spots, and although the lid is plastic rather than metal it is tolerably pressure resistant and should help protect the screen.

The Versa C150 doesn't have an expansion bus dedicated for use with a port replicator, but it has pretty well everything else, including parallel and serial (1 x 9-pin), three USB connectors, S-video TV output and FireWire.

An internal 56Kbps modem and 10/100Base-TX LAN adaptor are standard and there's an empty MiniPCI card slot next to the memory modules which can be used to upgrade to WLAN if required. The usual pair of Type II PC Card slots is also there to provide additional expansion potential.

Sitting down to write this review, we were pleased to find the Versa's keyboard logical and easy to adapt to. Large Enter, Spacebar and Backspace keys helped and the baseplate didn't flap about during typing as sometimes happens. To top this off, NEC has remembered to fit tilt feet under the back of the case, so if you are in for a long typing session you can improve the typing angle and take a bit of the strain off your forearms.

The screen isn't designed to impress - it simply does the job. It operates at 1024 x 768 on the standard 14.1-inch diagonal, so it's easy to read, and the sidelights illuminate the image well.

Much the same could be said of the ATI Radeon IGP 320M graphics chip. This enlists the help of 32MB of system memory and uses it to deliver perfectly sound 2D performance. It will do 3D acceleration too, but at a rather moderate pace according to our bench tests. Nevertheless, this is a general business machine and for now 3D performance remains largely irrelevant in that market.

The review sample came fitted with 384MB of PC2100 DDR memory and even with 32MB of that nabbed by the graphics, it still gave the mobile AMD Athlon XP1900+ processor plenty of room to stretch its legs. This inherently fast combination was well supported by the responsive 40GB Toshiba hard disk, and the net result is a very rapid notebook. Especially for the price, which reflects the relatively high specification of the review unit.

When we managed to get nearly 3 hours and 20 minutes of continuous use out of the Versa C150 running on its 4,000mAh Li-Ion battery, our initially positive first impression had been completely confirmed: this is a decent piece of kit.

NEC throws in Windows XP Professional (or Home if required), Word, Money and Norton Antivirus, and the hardware is covered by a one year collect and return warranty.
So there it is - fast, handsome, affordable, big brand and able to deliver when it comes to running on batteries. A strong hand.

It's rare for us to wax so lyrical about any product, but the NEC Versa C150 makes its case persuasively. It offers plenty of power, good battery life and a decent specification for the price. It's also well made and noticeably better looking than the typical corporate notebook.