All-Purpose: Sony VAIO VGN-SZ791N
A not-quite-ultraportable notebook, Sony's VAIO VGN-SZ791N is really a "tweener." It has the size and weight of a borderline ultraportable (it weighs 4 pounds and has a 13.3-inch screen), but this laptop is a racehorse at the track, and it is built for business.
In fact, when it comes to straight sprints in WorldBench 6, Sony's VGN-SZ791N is unstoppable. Scoring 94, it outran the nearest-performing all-purpose notebook, Fujitsu's Lifebook A6120, by a full 10 percent--and kept pace as well with beefier desktop replacement models. This is thanks in no small part to the combo of an Intel 2.5-GHz Core 2 Duo T9300 CPU and an nVidia 8400GS GPU revving under the hood. If you're paying close attention, you may have noticed that Sony takes the same Penryn-based CPU of our top desktop replacement pick and fine-tunes it for this more mobile unit.
As for battery life, the SZ791N doesn't quite achieve a runaway success, but it does last 3 hours, 50 minutes on a single charge. That's slightly better than the average all-purpose notebook. A power management toggle on the keyboard switches between a Speed and a Stamina mode; I assumed that this would add more borrowed time to work with, but it didn't do much. Besides throttling down the CPU, this one-step "solution" tweaks a couple features (like lowering the resolution) and forces the computer to reboot. I couldn't help but wonder how much power was killed jumping through all those hoops in the first place.
A couple of notebooks have managed to squeeze out more juice than the SZ791N, but by far the most long-lasting laptop among all-purpose models we've tested recently is HP's Pavilion dv2660se. It's a true marathoner, cranking away for 6 hours, 19 minutes on the 12-cell extended-life battery it ships with. However, this Pavilion didn't walk away with the top spot because its CPU dragged it below the average of other all-purpose laptops' scores in our WorldBench 6 tests.
Among the "money is no object" set, the Sony VAIO VGN-SZ791N will make a solid choice. It may cost $2500, but this pint-sized powerhouse can run circles around the competition for nearly 4 hours.
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