Ultraportable Laptops information

This report covers Windows laptops with a balance of trade-offs that favor portability over most other considerations. The most obvious alternative is a slightly heavier and larger laptop. You'll get a bigger display, a bigger keyboard (often), better battery life and a lower price. These laptops are covered in our reports on mainstream laptops and cheap laptops (priced under $1,000). Our report on mini laptops covers even smaller and less expensive options, such as netbooks, but most such laptops don't deliver the full performance and usability of the lightweight laptops covered here.

The Apple MacBook and MacBook Air are ultraportable laptops. They run the Apple Macintosh operating system, but can also run Windows. However, since Windows does not ship with those laptops, you'll need to budget extra for that. See our report on Apple laptops and desktops for details.

Windows Vista information can be found in pretty much any computer publication, but the Microsoft website has an extensive section as well.

NotebookCheck.net has all the up-to-date educational material you could want.

"Building the Perfect Laptop" by Steve Hamm and Kenji Hall details Lenovo's 20-month quest to create the ThinkPad X300. While that laptop has since been upgraded as the Lenovo ThinkPad X301, it is still an interesting read.

LaptopConsumers.com has a buyer's guide and general information.

You can research and customize notebook computers on manufacturers' websites:

Acer

Asus

Dell

Gateway

HP

Lenovo

Panasonic

Samsung

Sony

Toshiba