WHAT'S HOT: The LifeBook S is one of the lightest notebooks you can buy with a modular bay. With its 13.3-inch screen and with a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combination drive in its bay (on the left side), the LifeBook S weighs just 3.8 pounds. Adding the USB 1.1 floppy drive and AC adapter brings its weight to 5.7 pounds.

The LifeBook S is now equipped with a Wi-Fi (802.11b) receiver; the antennas are inside a long, black plastic panel that runs along the top edge of the lid. The wireless receiver's on/off switch is on the back of the notebook, where the power switch was located in earlier models. Meanwhile, the power switch has moved to a more convenient location on the side of the unit, next to the FireWire port.

The LifeBook S offers a battery life of 2 hours, 43 minutes, which is good for an ultraportable. You can put a second battery in the modular bay for more running time.

WHAT'S NOT: Like most ultraportables, the LifeBook S lacks parallel, serial, and PS/2 connections. Unfortunately for offices that still use these legacy ports, Fujitsu charges $138 for the port replicator that supplies the connections. The replicator is a snap-on foot that duplicates the ethernet, USB 1.1, and monitor ports it covers, and adds separate PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports, parallel and serial connections, and a floppy-drive connection.

The LifeBook S is not well suited to heavy-duty multimedia or graphics, either. Though you get an extra audio line-in port, graphics memory is limited to the 8MB (using system RAM), and the built-in stereo speakers sound tinny. Also, you don't get any on-screen documentation, which would have been especially welcome in an ultraportable. Productivity applications aren't included in this price.

WHAT ELSE: Our review unit came equipped with a 1-GHz/733-MHz Pentium III-M processor. The fastest S Series model yet, it earned a PC WorldBench 4 score of 94--just below the average of other systems running such a CPU.

This S Series model is a nicely designed ultraportable overall, and it features several improvements over earlier iterations of the S Series. The keyboard is much easier to type on, though some command keys (including Page Up and Page Down) are half-size, and the right Shift key is still too small. The handy LCD status panel displays remaining battery life. The screws holding in the panels covering system memory and the hard drive are no longer deeply recessed, so they're a little easier to remove. The same simple side lever ejects bay devices in a snap. However, the battery is still pretty awkward to remove--to dislodge it you have to slide two releases simultaneously and then turn the notebook over and shake it.

The unit's design provides the same set of dual-purpose shortcut buttons as before. These buttons--which are small and rectangular, but sit in finger-friendly depressions--can serve either as a password security system or as dedicated application launchers.

If you don't need the USB 1.1 floppy drive, you can knock $20 off the price.

UPSHOT: With the addition of wireless networking hardware and a comfier keyboard, the LifeBook S becomes an even better choice for corporate nomads.

SUMMARY

Fujitsu LifeBook S Series PC WorldBench score of 94, 1-GHz/733-MHz Pentium III-M, 256MB of PC133 SDRAM, 512KB L2 cache, Windows XP Professional, 13.3-inch active-matrix screen, integrated graphics with 8MB of shared memory, 40GB hard drive, 8X DVD-ROM and 16X/10X/24X CD-RW combination drive, built-in V.90 modem and network interface, 802.11b wireless, touchpad pointing device, 5.7 pounds (including USB 1.1 floppy drive, AC adapter and phone cord). One-year parts and labor warranty; free, unlimited 24-hour toll-free technical support. $1929 877/372-3473 www.fujitsupc.com