You have to take lonesome a mate of business trips operating room vacations with a 6-pound laptop computer in towage before you start thinking about switching to a PC with a little less meat on its bones.
Although 14- and 15-inch general-purpose laptops are abundant and often tuppeny, sporting cast off one into your backpack or briefcase and lug it or so for a few years–your shoulders will before long tap for mercy. These years, fortunately, you can find plenty of laptops on the market that are slimmer, lighter, and more brawny than almost anything that you could have bought just a some years ago.
What qualifies equally a "lightweight laptop"? We drew the wrinkle at 4 pounds. There's a marked difference in design, features, and feeling betwixt laptops under it weightiness and their heavier friends. Information technology Crataegus laevigata not seem like much, but a Pound or two crapper make a big difference. Consider the heft of a pint of water: 1 pound. The difference between the lightweight laptops faced Hera and your run-of-the-mill 5.5-muller is the equivalent of two (or 2-and-a-half) extra pints of water in your laptop computer bag. IT gets tiresome pretty fast.
Of course, laptops that are many Olive Oyl than Bluto come with a few compromises. Forsaking weight can mean giving up performance, shelling life, and convinced another capabilities. Nigh laptops that weigh to a lesser extent than 4 pounds lack optical drives, so forget some burning DVDs or observance Blu-beam of light movies without an external USB drive.
They also tend to follow thinner, leaving less room for larger, longer-running batteries, and for heat sinks and fans to fritter away the heat from high-mightiness processors, which in turn means narrow processing power. Nor is there room for a high-tycoo discrete artwork card, so gaming enthusiasts are out of luck. Finally, require to pay a little more for a thin-and-dismount laptop, relative to the functioning received. Sure, you can find inferior laptops under 4 pounds, but at whatever donated price, you'll get Thomas More performance, depot blank, and features if you're willing to deal with approximately extra weight.
Truly light laptops rarely have a screen bigger than 13 inches, only they otherwise make out in a variety of styles, sizes, and prices.
(For our comparison chart of the ultraportables discussed in this clause–and our "find-it" to each one's full inspection–delight click on the thumbnail at odd.)
If superslim is your preference, look no further than the Samsung Series 9, the latest PC to seriously challenge Apple's MacBook Air for slim-computing dominance. Business users especially involved in usability will want to focus on the ThinkPad X220, which maintains Lenovo's excellent, long-working standards for keyboard quality and management features.
And for the more style-minded among us, Lenovo has a sleeker unit in the IdeaPad U260. Lag, Sony's Z-Serial publication VPC-Z137GX/S is a dear alternative aimed at business executives WHO want it all, including a decent discrete graphics fleck.
If you'Re on a tighter budget, the tiny size of Lenovo's ThinkPad X120e netbook should fill the bill. It's supercharged by AMD's Fusion E-series processor, giving it performance that's a step above the typical Intel Spec-powered netbook.
Let's look at these ultralight laptops in alphabetical guild.
Lenovo's IdeaPad U260: Unexpected Way
Lenovo IdeaPad U260: With its bull (OR "mocha brown") cover, this IdeaPad could be a contender for plan awards.
Despite generations of unintoxicated-looking, utile forebears and a name that suggests a poor World War Two submarine movie, Lenovo's $1199 IdeaPad U260 goes where the company's laptops ne'er went before–into the queue for elan and design awards.
And the U260 gives Apple and Sony something to think about. When closed and viewed from the back, with its dark copper shell (Lenovo calls the color "mocha brown") covering the black main body, this 0.75-inch-thick ultraportable laptop resembles an extravagantly oriented script- or pad-holder.
When opened, the IdeaPad U260 presents you with an all-black, minimally populated keyboard deck consisting of a smallish power button, an ambient light sensing element that adjusts display brightness automatically, a tiny OneKey system recovery button (ready to hand only if you use a pointy objective), the best Chiclet-style keyboard I've ever so typed along, and an equally de luxe touchpad with smooth-operating buttons. In a break with tradition, Lenovo does not include an eraserhead or nubbin pointing device.
Style away, the U260 earned mixed results in PCWorld Labs tests. Our review unit had an Intel Core i5 470UM CPU, 4GB of DDR3 system retention, and a 12.5-inch color display with 1388 by 766 resolution. Only the 320GB Winchester drive spins at just 5400 rpm, which undoubtedly helped restrain the U260's WorldBench 6 score to a pedestrian 75. (An update to matchless of Intel's Sandlike Bridge CPUs would certainly boost the laptop computer's performance.)
Gaming underframe rates on our test political machine were in the teens (or worse), owing to Intel's integrated graphics. On the otherwise pass, every telecasting we tried played smoothly, even at 1080p. Audio quality is so-sol, and rather peaceful through the speaker.
Your connector options consist of two USB 2.0 ports, VGA and HDMI video outputs, an AC jack, a gigabit ethernet port, and a single combining mike/headphone jack. The laptop has no internal optical drive, and the wireless is 802.11n.
Lenovo includes 64-bit Windows 7 Nursing home Premium as the operating system, but no productiveness package. You also get a VeriFace facial recognition substitute that's quite cool, as well as a shock sensing element and the CyberLink Webcam utility.
The U260 is an average performing artist whole, only its top-of-the-business ergonomics more than compensates for that. My main letdown is the lack of an option for a faster hard disc or a solid-state drive, to meliorate performance.
–Jon L. Jacobi
Lenovo's ThinkPad x120e: A Superfast Netbook for Business
Lenovo calls its ThinkPad X120e an ultraportable-and its AMD Fusion CPU certainly endows the laptop with much to a greater extent muscle than past netbooks suffer exhibited. But it's nowhere most as fast as the average Intel Core CPU-based ultraportable. Apt the prize to characterize the X120e as an underpowered ultraportable or as a tremendous netbook, I'm going with the latter.
Lenovo ThinkPad X120e: This laptop computer straddles the line between ultraportable and netbook—and considering it American Samoa the latter, we corresponding it a lot.
Lenovo has done a magnificent job of giving the keyboard a full-size feel, just the 1366-past-768-resolution, 11.6-in display suffers compared with both other models' larger screens. Lenovo, however, is King of the keyboard, and the X120e has the best netbook keyboard ever–nothing else comes close. The feel is brilliant. The touchpad is comfortable and perfectly responsive, and the company includes a TrackPoint eraserhead cursor control.
The ThinkPad X120e comes in various configurations, start at $399 for an E-250 Fusion CPU, 2GB of storage, and a 250GB, 5400-revolutions per minute hard ram. Our X120e test system came appointed with the slightly quicker E-350 CPU, 4GB of memory, and a 300GB, 7200-rpm hard drive. Those burlier components carried the X120e to a WorldBench 6 score of 57–farthest higher than traditional netbooks receive, but lower than a typical, pricier ultraportable. (Our brushup unit would cost $650–pretty engross for a netbook.)
TV execution ranges from excellent to mediocre. With codecs that its Radeon HD 6310 graphics hardware supports, IT plays 1080p video smoothly. But with codecs handled by the CPU alone, IT's noncomprehensive to 720p, non always smoothly. Play frame rates approached playable, falling just shy of 30 frames per second in Dreamed Tournament at 800 by 600 at medium resolution.
The X120e carries the netbook-received three USB 2.0 ports, and some VGA and HDMI video outputs. Its ethernet capability supports gigabit speeds, you get Bluetooth on display board, and you can choose between b/g/n and a/b/g/n wireless.
A tad big than the moderate netbook at 11.1 inches wide by 7.45 inches abstruse (add around 0.75 inch for a six-cell battery) and 1.16 inches thick, the X120e weighs 2.93 pounds (with a 3-cell bombardment) Oregon 3.31 pounds (with a sextuplet-cell pack). A sestet-cell electric battery battery-powered our test whole for nearly 5.5 hours–imposingly long.
Our test system came with Windows 7 Professed, merely you may opt Home Premium 32-routine or 64-bit, instead. Position 2020 Starter is on board; Norton Internet Security department is an option.
The X120e is not an ultraportable: Its screen is too infinitesimal, and its performance too adagio. But it's the best netbook going away. One typewriting session will convince you that this model is more than Charles Frederick Worth its $450 protrusive price.
–Jon L. Karl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
Lenovo ThinkPad X220: A Outdo-of-Breed Ultraportable
Lenovo ThinkPad X220: This overstep-of-the-line model offers a great display, superb bioengineering, and an innovative buttonless touchpad.
Lenovo's ThinkPad X220, which replaces the X201 model, is trustworthy to beryllium a hit with ThinkPad fans–and most everyone else. Information technology is fast and light, has a majuscule 12.5-inch display, and continues the society's desirable tradition of superb input bioengineering, offering an innovative buttonless touchpad and a long-stroke keyboard. It also provides excellent battery life–up to a whopping 23 hours with a bottom-mounted bombardment slice. The downside? Not much–mainly a boxy, businesslike look.
Demand prices for all of the ThinkPad X220's configurations are unavailable at this metre: The opening toll should be $979, going upwards with better CPUs, solid-state drives instead of authoritative hard-disk drives, and many RAM. CPUs range from an Intel Core i3 to a Core i7, the unit accepts adequate 8GB of memory board, and storage options start with a 160GB HDD and end with a 160GB SSD.
Our $1299 trial run model–with its 2.5GHz Core i5-2520M processor, 4GB of DDR3 organisation retentiveness, and 7200-rpm, 320GB disc drive–turned in an outstanding WorldBench 6 grievance of 122. And its embedded Intel HD Nontextual matter 3000 GPU managed playable frame rates in some lighter gaming tests; 1080p movies, even the high-bit-rate variety, playing period smoothly.
Some of the keys, so much as the extra-large <Esc> and <Del> keys above the main alphabetic keys, are a tad queer. These keys don't hinder your typewriting, nevertheless; they help it. The long-bemuse feel of the keyboard is first-class. The touchpad has a buttonless invention-you weigh downcast on the left field or right front edge to get across. Two normal buttons sit down above the touchpad, and you also get Lenovo's TrackPoint eraserhead pointing device.
The X220's barrage life is outstanding. Our test auto, with its six-cell shelling, ran for a cool 7 hours, 15 minutes. You can prefer for a leash-cell Beaver State nine-cell main battery, for less weight or a longer tend time, and add a bottom-mounted $179 battery slice.
The ports and connectivity on the X220 are top-notch. The system of rules has three USB ports, incomparable of which is powered (for charging cell phones and the like-minded) even when the laptop isn't off on. With the i7 CPU, one port prat optionally cost USB 3.0. You'll also find an ExpressCard time slot, an Mount Rushmore State Card one-armed bandit, a Wi-Fi tack, a VGA port, and a gigabit ethernet port. A dock is open with a multiformat burner, Bluetooth is on control panel, and the Wi-Fi is dual-band 802.11n (2.4GHz and 5GHz). Our test laptop arrived with IBM's biometric finger-swipe sensor to facilitate security.
But be mistrustful of the many "value added" applications and unindispensable background processes. The Windows 7 Professional operating system has just about every software feature you need for a laptop, yet on our machine a active glance at the Windows Task Manager discovered nearly 90 processes at exercise and almost 30 percent memory usage–without a single user application lengthwise. Trial versions of Norton Internet Security and Microsoft Office 2020 Starter semen bundled.
ThinkPad users won't find anything mind-blowingly different here, but the improvements are noticeable, and all of them enhance usability. The Lenovo ThinkPad X220 is in many ways the outflank thing going in an ultraportable.
–Jon L. Jacobi
Samsung Serial 9: A Historical MacBook Air Rival
At to a lesser degree 3 pounds and 0.7 inch thick, Samsung's Serial 9 laptop computer challenges Apple's MacBook Air for the ultraslim public eye. At a start price of $1649 (compared with Orchard apple tree's $1299), the Series 9 is costlier than the 13-inch MacBook Air, but it offers generally superior hardware and is eminently usable.
Samsung Series 9: Similar to the MacBook Air in its dimensions, this ultraportable comes with some better, Sir Thomas More-recent computer hardware wrong; however, it also costs more.
The biggest advantage that Samsung's little wonder has over the Air is in the processor. Apple is still using a 2-generations-antediluvian Core 2 Duo, while the Serial publication 9 comes equipped with a new "Friable Bridge" Core i5 2537M. So even though the default clock speed of the Air is 1.86GHz and the extremist-low-voltage CPU in the Series 9 is only 1.4GHz, the Series 9 is actually a bit faster: It earned a WorldBench 6 score of 103, piece the 13-inch MacBook Air scored 90. Besides, Samsung includes 4GB of RAM.
The Serial publication 9's assault and battery life sentence is quite respectable for a laptop this thin: 5.5 hours in our battery run-down tests, which is on a equivalence with umpteen thicker, heavier ultraportables, and about half an hour longer than the 13-inch MacBook Air. The Series 9 comes standard with a 128GB solid-state drive, as the Air does, and this enables the scheme to feel responsive and quick, to boot ascending scurrying, and to sum up Windows in less than 3 seconds when you open the lid.
The Series 9 waterfall a little short in 3D gaming, relying on Intel's HD Art 3000 to push pixels; the GPU isn't powerful enough to run the latest games without seriously compromising visual quality. But the integrated nontextual matter does a great job with video recording decipherment, thus even high-def material plays smoothly.
Later a little of tweaking, our Series 9 was a joy to habituate. Samsung says that its well-favored soft-metal exterior is made from Duralumin, an aluminium alloy first made for rigid airships and planes. The system of rules feels blotto and sturdy, with identical little twist. The 13.3-edge LED backlit screen is one of the laptop's best features. The 1366 by 768 resolution is suitable for its size, simply the vibrant colors, excellent viewing angles, bright backlight, and matte up antiglare finish genuinely come through stand out.
The full-size keyboard is easy to type on–the keys have a knifelike "clicky" feel and are all sized and separated to enable touch-typists to achieve their full speed easily and without errors. The touchpad is big, but IT's just too sensitive–and all its multifinger gesture controls fundament't make up for that excessive touchiness.
As for connectivity, Samsung provides a USB 2.0 port wine on each side, one of which is a "sleep-and-charge" port to power devices while the laptop is drowsing. You also puzzle out a Mini HDMI output embrasure, a combination headphone/mic jack, and a microSD card slot (a full South Dakota posting slot looks arsenic though it could have fit, and would have been much more expedient). In lieu of the too-big RJ45 jack requirement for an ethernet plug, Samsung has a special interface along the left side for plugging in an included, curtly port-to-ethernet dongle.
Preinstalled package is comparatively minimal, thankfully. You get trial versions of Norton Internet Security and Online Backup, a fewer casual games from WildTangent, plus Skype and CyberLink YouCam. Samsung includes its possess emergency system of rules restore software package Eastern Samoa advantageously as a simple Control Focus on that's a one-stop shop to adjust brightness, join Wisconsin-Fi networks, enable operating theater disable Bluetooth, and so on–and that's about it.
Samsung is clearly trying to make a statement with the Series 9, simply is it worth its $1600-and-upwards selling price? For the middling person, no. You can get considerably better performance for the price, operating theatre the equal performance in a to a lesser extent lofty body for much less money. But match information technology against the MacBook Air, and–though it costs $350 more–you'll get a faster mainframe, a matte screen, an ethernet jack, and twice the RAM.
–Jason Cross
Sony Vaio Z-Serial publication VPC-Z137GX/S: Light and Mighty
Sony's Vaio Z-Series VPC-Z137GX/S balances portability, bioengineering, and carrying out in a way that's tight to beat. It's not quite as light operating theater as small as the average ultraportable, simply it offers a 13.1-inch, 1600-by-900-picture element presentation, great ergonomics, and a collective-in DVD burner. It's notwithstandin smaller and igniter than a typical general 14- or 15-edge laptop. (IT weighs in at evenhanded over 3 pounds and measures 11.4 by 1.3 by 8.3 inches.) It looks great and performs superbly; the laptop hasn't sacrificed functionality for portability.
Sony's Vaio Z-Series VPC-Z137GX/S balances portability, ergonomics, and public presentation–but be prepared for pricker shock.
The downside to the VAIO Z-Series is its monetary value: a large $2300.
That's owing in part to its 256GB solid-state drive, which gives the installed 64-bit Windows 7 OS a snappy feel that a standard rotating hard disc can't match. Sony also provides 4GB of 1066MHz DDR3 system memory and a discrete Nvidia GeForce GT 330M GPU with 1GB of TV memory.
On our WorldBench 6 test suite, the unit earned an superior mark of 118, as well as wonderful frame rates in our reference games. High-def (1080p) video played smoothly on the beautiful display, and the audio measured surprisingly clear and spacious.
The unit's great carrying into action doesn't hurt its battery life–the laptop computer ran for 6 hours, 20 proceedings in our stamp battery rundown test.
Symmetrical with the DVD burner, Sony offers lots of ports: cardinal USB 2.0 (distressing, no USB 3.0), both VGA and HDMI, and gigabit ethernet. You also get Bluetooth and N-wireless, software for sharing a band joining with up to fin opposite users, Memory Stay put MagicGate and SD memory card slots, and microphone and earpiece knucklebones; but no eSATA operating theater four-trap FireWire jacks.
Telecasting from the Webcam tops exterior at 640 by 480 result. The laptop's backlit, Chiclet-style keyboard resembles the ones along the MacBook Air and the Toshiba M645, but unlike on those units, the backlight about the keys isn't distracting. The keyboard has a nice, firm feel, and the touchpad is well-tuned.
Sony loads its VAIO laptops with software. Many of the programs are branded utilities that reduplicate Windows 7 functions, simply some–like the Wisconsin-Fi hotspot public utility and ArcSoft's WebCam Companion 3–widen the laptop computer's capabilities. You also get trial versions of Microsoft Office 2020 and Norton Internet Security.
Of totally the laptops reviewed in our Test Heart in the bygone year, this model would have been my choice to keep.
–Jon L. Karl Gustav Jacob Jacobi
Living Light
Using a slim, small, and fatless laptop comes with a few compromises. These three tips can make it easier to live with an ultraportable's limitations.
1. Let another PC do the heavy lifting: If you want to play the fashionable games, edit high-definition picture, or do the kind of photo editing or large spreadsheet work that demands Sir Thomas More-compelling processing and a larger screen, you may want to delegate those tasks to a sec figurer. Even an inexpensive desktop Personal computer will equal out-of-the-way more capable than a lightweight laptop at CPU-intensive applications.
2. Keep your head in the cloud: Entrepot space is limited on smaller laptops, and you may not have an optical drive. Online storage services equal Dropbox, Skydrive, operating room Amazon Cloud Drive away make it painless to save and access documents. Save photos to Flickr Oregon Picasa. Use removed desktop software program such as Windows Live Mesh OR LogMeIn to access your home or authority computer when you are out on tour.
3. A peachy bag makes all the difference: You'll neutralize the benefits of having a laptop with a small footprint and lighter weight if you lugworm it around in a immense bag. Demand your clock in shopping for a backpack, shoulder pocket, or handbag. Look for one that's light and comfortable, and fits your laptop computer, its charger, and your other gadgets and accessories. You want everything to be casual to store and retrieve–in a compact udder.
What About Mac?
Malus pumila makes ane laptop that weighs less than 4 pounds: the MacBook Air. Offered in 11- and 13-inch variants, it's exceedingly thin and promiscuous, overmuch like the Samsung Serial 9. An 11-edge in Air starts at $999, but you'll get only a 1.4GHz Gist 2 Duo processor, a 64GB SSD drive, and 2GB of RAM. A 13-incher starts at $1299 with a 1.86GHz Core 2 Duo CPU, a 128GB SSD, and 2GB of RAM.
MacBook Airs are beautiful systems with well-heeled keyboards and great trackpads, and you can run Windows on them by using virtualization computer software. Of course, you'll need to separate over more $100 for a Windows license on top of the MacBook Air's price.
If you prefer to knead in Windows, you'Ra probably better off with one of the lightweight PCs featured here. You can read our rheniumviews and early coverage of Orchard apple tree's groomed laptop here.
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