Stories by: Carla Thornton

The Fujitsu LifeBook T4220 is designed to weather outside use better than your typical convertible tablet. It has a nice keyboard and performs well, too, all at a competitive price.

It might not be terribly cheap, but Dell's Inspiron 1420 offers plenty of portable power and options without sacrificing fun.

The HP Compaq 2710p is a highly configurable convertible notebook with some ultracool features. It doesn't have a very fast processor or an integrated optical drive, but its battery life is fabulous and its screen is responsive.

Laptops. Notebooks. Portables. Whatever you prefer to call them, they've done as much to change our digital lives as any other piece of hardware in the last quarter century.

Dell's entry-level multimedia laptop, the XPS M1210 has some excellent show-biz genes, such as media buttons and a TV tuner option. But it's also a strong, well-designed, and highly mobile performer. The Windows Vista refresh only enhances the earlier XP version's strong points.

The Acer Aspire 9305WSMi delivers plenty of usability, if not speed, for a budget desktop replacement. Equipped with a 1.6-GHz AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-50 processor and only 1GB of memory, it's a bit slow, but it provides plenty of performance for Web surfers and word processors looking for a big screen, a full-size keyboard, and lots of file storage at a reasonable price. At 3.5 hours, its battery life is surprisingly good, too.

Eight months ago Intel rocked the mobile processor world with its first dual-core CPUs, which in our tests outpaced a similarly configured laptop running on a single-core processor by 30 percent when performing two tasks simultaneously. Now comes Core Duo's successor, Core 2 Duo, with claims of even better performance plus 64-bit support. Should you be kicking yourself for jumping the gun and buying a Core Duo notebook earlier this year?

Eight months ago Intel rocked the mobile processor world with its first dual-core CPUs, which in our tests outpaced a similarly configured laptop running on a single-core processor by 30 percent when performing two tasks simultaneously. Now comes Core Duo's successor, Core 2 Duo, with claims of even better performance plus 64-bit support. Should you be kicking yourself for jumping the gun and buying a Core Duo notebook earlier this year?

Eight months ago Intel rocked the mobile processor world with its first dual-core CPUs, which boosted the speed of a notebook performing two tasks simultaneously by 30 percent. Now comes Core Duo's successor, Core 2 Duo, accompanied by Intel claims of even better performance and support for the coming era of 64-bit computing. Should you kick yourself for buying that Core Duo notebook in May?

Because it has only one internal media bay, the Sharp PC-AR50 measures a relatively thin 1.3 inches tall and weighs only 5.9 pounds, not including the AC adapter. You can hot-swap the floppy drive and the 8X/4X/24X CD-RW drive you get at this price, or you can put a second battery in the bay.

For a miserly $2599, Dell's new budget laptop for consumers and small businesses comes equipped with a 12.1-inch screen, easy-to-reach parts, and an extra set of dual-purpose buttons that play music CDs or launch applications. If you don't like that configuration, Dell offers many more options than is typical for a single notebook model: a smaller or bigger screen, a slower or faster processor (up to a Pentium III-800), a hard drive as large as 20GB, plus TV-out, an IEEE 1394 port, and network connections.