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Your notebook means business in every sense of the word. The problem is, not everyone defines their work style the same way. Busy professionals crave an equally agile, lightweight laptop to fit their life in motion. Others need the brute force (and huge screens) that only a desktop replacement "portable" can provide. Then there is everyone else--people who want to combine reasonable power with the flexibility to go anywhere.

Most of us, though, no matter which kind of machine we favor, want to find that Zen state of great mobile performance and better battery life.

That's exactly what we're aiming to do here. Pouring over reams of data on products in our three laptop categories--namely, ultraportable, all-purpose, and power--we've sifted out our choice in each category for notebooks that offer the best balance of performance and endurance. Everything else is secondary. That means that money is not an object in this search for the best workhorse computers--although the reasonableness of the prices for two of our winning models will likely catch your attention.