Voodoo
With a name like Voodoo, you wouldn’t expect the company’s laptops to be boring, and true to form, the Envy series is anything but. Voodoo categorizes the five different types of Envy notebooks by weight, with one considered Featherweight, two in the Middleweight category, and two in the Heavyweight category.

The Voodoo Envy a228 laptop is the lone entry in the Featherweight category, and at less than four pounds it’s built for portability. It includes an AMD Turion processor and an ATI graphics adapter, so it’s definitely no slouch in the speed department, and it’s actually more powerful than other comparable laptops in this weight range.

The two Middleweight entrants, the u734 and the w151, are a step up in the power department, with Intel dual core processors. But while the w151 has an ATI graphics adapter, the u734 is built for multimedia, with an Nvidia Geforce 7900 GTX graphics adapter and a 17 inch widescreen display.

In the Heavyweight category, the w201 and u709 break all the rules when it comes to mobile computing. They weigh upwards of 12 pounds, and sport huge widescreen displays, with the w201 having a 20 inch monster screen and dual NVIDIA graphics adapters. For chipsets, the u709 has a choice between the Athlon FX and Dual Core desktop processors, both made by AMD. In short, these models aren’t even really like laptops – they are more like carrying around small desktop computers with the amount of computing and graphics power they each have. And they are priced accordingly, at upwards of four and five thousand dollars.

But what really sets Voodoo laptop computers apart is the styling. They come in garish colors such as monza olive, infineon red, and laguna seca blue. And for an extra fee, one can have stenciled onto the outside of their Voodoo notebook computer “personal tattoos” resembling tribal designs, which come in his and hers designs.

These models are expensive, but there are other options available if one is looking for cheap Voodoo laptops. In the US and UK, Voodoo laptops can often be found on auction and classifieds sites for far less than one would pay retail. But while buying a used Envy would definitely keep the cost down, it would defeat the whole purpose of buying one of these unique machines, which is to personalize it to make a design statement.