Toshiba Tecra M1

WHAT'S HOT: Need a notebook that works unplugged all day on one battery charge? The Toshiba Tecra M1 comes close: Its single lithium ion power pack carried it through 6 hours, 29 minutes of work in our tests--just 9 minutes shy of the record set by its near-twin sibling, the Tecra S1 we tested last June.

If you need even more time, you can swap out the optical drive (a DVD-R/RW/RAM model in our system) from the M1's expansion bay and replace it with a $169 secondary battery. Or, you can use the modular bay to boost storage instead by swapping in a second hard drive ($428 for 60GB, including a required adapter). With the included dummy module in the bay, the notebook's weight drops from 7.1 pounds to 5.6 pounds. An SD memory card slot and dual pointing devices round out the M1's conveniences.

WHAT'S NOT: The M1, with a PC WorldBench 4 score of 113, lagged well behind the five other 1.6-GHz Pentium M-equipped notebooks we've tested so far (all of which scored 122 or higher).

Swapping devices in and out of the modular bay is a bit of a pain because the optical drive tends to stick; on the bright side, however, it was not as stubborn as the optical drive in the Toshiba Tecra S1 we tested, which we had to pry out using the flat end of a screwdriver.

We also ran into an unusual problem with the M1's power control. For all notebooks, we test battery life using their highest possible energy-conserving settings. But both the Super Long Life and Long Life settings on this model dimmed the screen backlight to a point that made text extremely difficult to read; on the other Toshiba models we've tested to date, the screens were readable even on the longest battery life setting. Because the M1's Super Long Life and Long Life settings made the notebook practically unusable, we had to select the Normal power setting for its battery test. (Fortunately, even at that setting the M1 ran for an impressively long time.)

WHAT ELSE: This black-and-silver portable with a stylishly beveled front sports plenty of connection options, including parallel, serial, S-Video, and FireWire ports, plus three USB 2.0 ports. A useful switch located on the front turns the notebook's wireless networking on and off.

Unlike the Tecra S1's hard, crisp keys, the M1's feel a bit springy. But the layout is easy to navigate, and both sets of mouse buttons worked fine once we figured out that the eraserhead's right mouse button is embedded in a somewhat illogical place--the top frame of the touchpad. The M1 also offers two handy reprogrammable shortcuts, one of which is by default set as a "presentation" button that lets you toggle between the notebook's screen and a connected monitor. Flanking the buttons is the M1's optical sensor, a large translucent button that samples the ambient light and automatically adjusts screen brightness. We didn't notice a radical change in screen brightness, however, even when we used the bundled software utility to set the widest possible range. (We performed battery tests under normal office lighting.)

The M1 boasts loud, though flat-sounding, stereo sound that pours out of speakers jutting from the back corners of the keyboard. A thumbwheel on the front makes adjusting volume a snap.

Removing the hard drive takes little time, as it's located beneath a bottom panel and held in by only one screw. Upgrading memory takes more work. Our configuration had one open slot, and getting to it required prying off the plastic panel at the top of the keyboard with the flat end of a screwdriver, removing three screws underneath, and peeling back the keyboard to expose the compartment. Like many new notebooks, the M1 doesn't come with much print documentation, just a "quick tour" sheet that mislabels a couple of the parts. However, the Acrobat PDF manual preinstalled on the hard drive is very detailed, and it's easy to use thanks to index and contents sections that link to the pages they reference.

UPSHOT: If you need your next notebook to work all day away from an outlet, look to the Tecra M1 or to its near-twin S1.