Shopping for a notebook computer used to be an exercise in betrayed gratification. The smaller the notebook, the more you lacked power, screen clarity and the kinds of bells and whistles that make computing cool. But if you haven't notebook-shopped lately, prepare to be blown away by the advancements in laptop technology.
The most easily transported laptops are ultraportables, which usually weigh four pounds or less, and slightly larger thin and lights, which top out at seven pounds.
Thin and lights generally aren't as powerful or as loaded with features as bigger laptops, but some come close. The IBM ThinkPad T42 (www.ibm.com, T series starting at $1,500) has IBM's typically comfortable keyboard, a crisp, 15-inch screen and weighs 5.8 pounds. It features IBM's Rescue and Recovery system that lets you tap your hard drive even if the main operating system fails to boot.
The Fujitsu LifeBook S7000 (www.fujitsu.com, starting at $1,500) has a 14.1-inch display, modular-drive bay, a hard drive up to 80 gigabytes, or GB, and fast Gigabit Ethernet. At just under five pounds, it's one of the lightest in the category.
We like the Gateway M320 series of notebooks (www.gateway.com, starting at $1,100). At the upper end is the M320XL ($1,800), which is only one-inch thick, weighs 5.5 pounds and has an 80 GB hard drive. It has a sharp, 15-inch display and four built-in memory-card readers.
The ultraportables in the Sony VAIO S Series (www.sonystyle.com, starting at $1,500) have roomy 13.3-inch displays. But at a tad over four pounds, they are a bit heavy for their class. They have comfortable-to-use keyboards, 40 GB, 60 GB or 80 GB hard drives and a built-in DVD/CD-RW combo drive or DVD burner.
The Fujitsu LifeBook P7000 (www.fujitsu.com, starting at $1,800) weighs 3.3 pounds, including its modular DVD/CD-RW drive. It has four memory-card slots and an optional ($50) fingerprint reader for security. The trade-off: a small keyboard and only a 10.6-inch screen.
If having a drive on board isn't important, consider the IBM ThinkPad X40 (www.ibm.com, starting at $1,500), a lightweight marvel at 2.7 pounds even though it has a 12.1-inch display. To use a disk drive, you need the ThinkPad X4 UltraBase dock ($200), which adds only 1.4 pounds. Its speakers are a bit tinny, and it only has a pointing stick — a pencil-eraser-shaped cursor control directed by fingertip — not a touchpad.