The Best Business Laptops

As for battery life, the SZ791N doesn't quite achieve a runaway success, but it does last 3 hours, 50 minutes on a single charge. That's slightly better than the average all-purpose notebook. A power management toggle on the keyboard switches between a Speed and a Stamina mode; I assumed that this would add more borrowed time to work with, but it didn't do much. Besides throttling down the CPU, this one-step "solution" tweaks a couple features (like lowering the resolution) and forces the computer to reboot. I couldn't help but wonder how much power was killed jumping through all those hoops in the first place.

A couple of notebooks   have managed to squeeze out more juice than the SZ791N, but by far the most long-lasting laptop among all-purpose models we've tested recently isHP's Pavilion dv2660se. It's a true marathoner, cranking away for 6 hours, 19 minutes on the 12-cell extended-life battery it ships with. However, this Pavilion didn't walk away with the top spot because its CPU dragged it below the average of other all-purpose laptops' scores in our WorldBench 6 tests.

Among the "money is no object" set, the Sony VAIO VGN-SZ791N will make a solid choice. It may cost $2500, but this pint-sized powerhouse can run circles around the competition for nearly 4 hours.

Ultraportables make all sorts of sacrifices-such as accepting anemic CPUs-in order to break into the welterweight computing class. Not Lenovo's ThinkPad line. Durable, svelte, and geared up for business, these PCs perform under pressure. In fact, a number of Lenovo's notebooks regularly creep into the Top 10 in the ultraportable category.

TheThinkPad X61isn't the fastest notebook you can find, but thanks to a Santa Rosa class Intel CPU (a 2-GHz Core 2 Duo T7300), it still managed to crack the top four in our WorldBench 6 test suite, scoring 75-not too shabby for an ultraportable machine; it comes in close behind theLenovo 3000 N200andDell's more potent XPS M1330. The only ultraportable that scores better, theMicro Express JFT2500, blows away the X61 by a huge 17 percent margin.

The problem is that there's a wide gap between ultraportable performance and endurance. Every machine that clocked a high score in performance fared miserably in battery tests-and vice versa. For example, the JFT2500--the fastest ultraportable we've tested--sits nowhere near the top of the battery-life pack. That honor goes to theASUS U2E, which ships with both a standard and a 6-cell extra-life battery that lasts an absurd 7 hours, 11 minutes in our tests. The ThinkPad X61 also comes with an extended-life power supply, but it runs about an hour less than the U2E by comparison (6 hours, 14 minutes, to be precise). Still, 6 hours is a good amount of time to survive our battery stress tests.

However, as I said from the beginning, this month's quest is for that best middle ground, and the X61 delivers in spades as a well-rounded machine in its category. It's aging a little (it came to market last year), but you can't argue with the X61's success. And considering that this tricked-out 12.1-inch portable notebook line starts at a little over $1000, it also happens to offer a lot for your money.