Pretty much any laptop, even those plastered with SRS WoW stickers and bristling with speaker grilles have woefully inadequate sound. Any laptop owner knows this, and we're all faced with the equally poor solutions of jacking some non-portable desktop speakers into our once-portable laptop, or grabbing a pair of headphones so at least one person gets clear sound.

Saitek have come up with a solution to this problem. Well, almost. The Saitek Laptop Supwoofer is basically a speaker in a plastic casing which draws its power from a USB port. The subwoofer is plugged into the ordinary audio-out port on your laptop, and thumping bass ensues. In theory.

I had two laptops handy for testing the subwoofer, both of which practise the irritating trick of cutting out the sound from their internal speakers when external ones are inserted. As this sound cut out is on the hardware level there was, unfortunately, little I could do about it. The result is a laptop with some acceptable thumping bass but absolutely no treble. A switch on the Subwoofer itself allows you to switch it into normal speaker mode where it provides a fullish range of sound, essentially replacing your laptop internal speakers with a mono external speaker which might be a little louder but is somewhat lacking for sound quality.

Suffice to say, the Laptop Subwoofer is not for the audiophile or, for that matter, for most Laptop users who have to put up with the sound cut-out design oversight. However, and this is a highly conditional however, the Laptop subwoofer is quite capable of doing what it says on the tin and delivering some reasonably meaty bass from a well designed laptop or a line-out if you have one. With a little jiggery pokery I managed to losen the audio connection so that it produced sound but did not cut out the laptop internal sound, this is a bit of a botch solution but I believe there may be a way for Saitek to incorporate it if there is ever a future design revision.

Aside from the connection problems the subwoofer suffers from another minor ailment. The USB lead gets hot, very hot. In fact I managed to burn myself on it at one point. If you keep your fingers clear of the lead you should be safe, alternatively you can wrap it round your cup of tea to keep it warm, or use it to cook pop tarts or something.

Overall the Laptop Subwoofer is a great concept, if a little poorly realised as it lacks proper support for many laptops. With the right laptop the thumping bass adds flavour to your listening experience, and it will work with desktop PCs and Macs too... or even an MP3 player if you connect it to a USB extension lead and power it with a near-by computer. Unfortunately it fails to make the cut with my kit, bar the MP3 player anyway.

Philip Howard