Best of 2008: The Most Impressive Laptops

Over the past year, we've seen netbooks explode on the scene, a paper-thin ultraportable challenge what we thought was possible, and powerful desktop replacements that really are suitable replacements for your desktop PC. But what were some of the most interesting laptops of 2008? Glad you asked.

Darren Gladstone, PC World

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Lenovo ThinkPad SL400 3 of 11

Usually, ThinkPads don't come cheap: You expect to pay dearly for the classy keyboard, the rugged chassis, and whatever top-notch parts lie under the hood. That isn't quite the case with Lenovo's SL400 laptops. These affordable, all-purpose machines start in the neighborhood of $650, yet they still offer much of what you expect from a ThinkPad. The ThinkPad SL400 configuration we tested was at the upper end of the series, selling for about $1223 (as of October 23, 2008), and it's a fairly solid deal. Inside sits a reasonably speedy Intel Core 2 Duo 2.26-GHz P8400 CPU backed up by 2GB of RAM and a 256MB nVidia GeForce 9300M GPU. Not too shabby. In our tests this combination performed well, garnering a score of 84 on our WorldBench 6 benchmark test suite--a strong enough showing for the SL400 to finish near the top of our results.