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Small price, essential features
If a good price is more important to you than a laptop's size or computing power, a value notebook should suit your needs. You can find some attractive deals in portables that occupy the middle ground between the lightest and the most loaded.
Walking away with the Editor's Pick in the value category is the IBM ThinkPad R40, a junior version of the T40. For a little over half the T40's price, this 6.6-pound notebook (without the AC adapter) offers many of the same features, including dual pointing devices and a ThinkLight, which is a small LED embedded in the lid that can illuminate the keyboard in dark rooms or in a dimly lit aircraft cabin.
The DVD burner-equipped Acer TravelMate 290LMi is a good bet for those who need to work with or distribute large multimedia files while on the road. The 290LMi turned in impressive battery life in our tests, running almost 5 hours.
The Toshiba Satellite A15-S127, which carries a 2-GHz Celeron processor, is the second-slowest notebook on the chart (after the ultraportable Averatec model), but you can't beat the $949 price for a laptop that comes with a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combination drive. Though the A15-S127's integrated graphics processor uses main memory, the portable still played our DVD movie smoothly. The A15-S127 also has a 15-inch screen and big-sounding stereo speakers--nice perks for the budget-conscious buyer who's looking for a little pizzazz in their first notebook.
