HP EVO N600c

WHAT'S HOT: The Evo N600c weighs just 5.2 pounds (not including the AC adapter or an extra-cost USB floppy drive). It sports Compaq's MultiPort bay in the lid, which in our review unit held an optional, futuristic-looking silver 802.11b wireless module.

You get both eraserhead and touchpad pointing devices, each with its own set of baby-blue mouse buttons. The removable optical drive (a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combination model in our test unit) can be swapped for a Zip 250 drive, an LS-120 (SuperDisk) drive, a second battery, or a second hard drive.

WHAT'S NOT: At $2799, the N600c costs more than other similarly configured notebooks--such as the Dell Inspiron 4100, which has the same processor, memory, and screen size, but costs $2149. Two small screws hold in the panel covering the N600c's memory sockets, and you can remove them only with a Torx screwdriver, which few people have lying around.

Using a 1.2-GHz/800-MHz Pentium III-M CPU and running Windows XP Professional, the Evo N600c fell behind similarly configured laptops in our performance testing; it earned a PC WorldBench 4 score of 97, compared with scores of 113 and 107 for IBM and Dell notebooks, respectively.