WHAT'S HOT: The Amax Elite 6400W, a handsome black-and-bluish-silver notebook, is wireless enabled and includes a SmartMedia card slot and convenient dual front bays. One bay holds the notebook's optical or floppy drive, while the other is dedicated to the battery. The Elite's SmartMedia slot, located on the left, provides a handy way to transfer photos from digital cameras that use the media. You also get a generous total of three USB 1.1 ports--one on the right and two on the back.

WHAT'S NOT: he Elite 6400W's stereo speakers strain at higher volumes, so you'll probably want to use headphones for listening to music CDs or watching DVD movies. Amax provides an Acrobat user's manual on CD; although it's fairly comprehensive and filled with color photographs, its translation suffers from some rough edges, and oddly, it does not have links, so you have to scroll back and forth to reach various sections.

WHAT ELSE: Nicely designed overall, the Elite 6400W weighs 7.3 pounds (including its power adapter) and measures 1.7 inches thick (including its four oval rubber feet). All of the conventional notebook connections are present, except serial and PS/2 ports, and all the ports are easy to reach.

To access the hard drive, you simply remove a couple of screws on the bottom of the notebook and tug the drive out of the left side using a convenient finger hold. A floppy drive is bundled with the Elite 6400W--a big plus for legacy fans. Unfortunately, the floppy drive uses the same bay as the DVD-ROM drive, which is not the most convenient arrangement. Neither the drive bay nor battery bay accepts any other devices.

The Elite 6400W's keyboard is extrafirm and nicely laid out, with dedicated Page Up and Page Down keys and the oft-used Ctrl key located in the left bottom corner where it's easy to find. The Delete and Insert keys are less conveniently placed, mixed in with other keys at the bottom right. A panel of useful shortcut and dedicated audio buttons grace the top of the keyboard, including an on/off button for wireless scanning, an Internet launcher, and one user-programmable button. Bright blue status LEDs wink from the notebook's screen hinge where they're easy to see, alongside a pair of useful volume buttons.

You can play music CDs without turning on the Elite. The audio controls include an impressive-looking but somewhat misleading "MP3" button, which is just a shortcut for the Windows Media Player. In addition to the SmartMedia slot, notable extras include an S-Video-out port, a FireWire port, and an extra audio line-in port.

An average performer, the Elite 6400W chalked up a PC WorldBench 4 score of 101, which is about par for a 2-GHz Pentium 4-M-equipped notebook. The notebook lasted 2.4 hours on one battery charge in our battery life tests--a tad below average even for a Pentium 4 notebook.

UPSHOT: The Amax Elite 6400W delivers most of the bells and whistles you'd expect in a $2000 notebook these days. All that's missing is a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combination drive.

SUMMARY

Amax Elite 6400W $