The competition is stiff among affordable mainstream laptops aimed at small-business users

We dislike notebooks whose system trays come cluttered with so many background apps that they slow down performance. Finally, the included warranty runs only one year for parts and labor, but the life-of-the-laptop HP Pavilion DV3100 Battery phone support is definitely welcome.

And on our iTunes encoding test, in which the test machine encodes 11 tracks from MP3 to AAC, also heavily taxing the CPU, the EliteBook 2740p more than held its own, completing HP Pavilion DV3500 Battery the process in 3 minutes and 40 seconds, which is a little slower than the 3:23 the ThinkPad required but faster than the 4:54 for the LifeBook.

At the M645-S4055’s native resolution of 1,366x768 and using the game’s high-quality HP Pavilion DV1200 Battery settings, we got a still impressive frame rate of 53.7fps.

The only other 14-inch laptop we’ve seen recently that had any real gaming performance to HP HSTNN-I04C Battery speak of was the $1,049 Lenovo IdeaPad Y460, which has an ATI Radeon HD 5650 GPU and dished out 100.5fps on Company of Heroes at 1,366x768, and 74.8fps at 1,024x768.

And they're typically a touch more compact than regular desktop-style mice. Microsoft’s Wireless Mobile Mouse 3500 isn’t fancy, but it HP HSTNN-DB30 Battery meets all the basic requirements of a notebook mouse, while being sleek and stylish, too.

Long known for its high-end, high-performance systems, Alienware continues to impress HP HSTNN-DB11 Battery with its new M17x gaming notebook.

Sporting a refreshed case design and a dizzying array of features and performance parts, the M17x sets the bar for DirectX 10 3D-gaming your website performance in a notebook.

The competition is stiff among affordable mainstream laptops aimed at small-business users, with Latitude D600 Battery entries like the Lenovo ThinkPad SL500 and more recent HP ProBook 4510s delivering a decent mix of styling, features, and performance for under $800.

Into this fray comes the $799 Toshiba Satellite Pro S300-EZ2521. It doesn’t have the shiny-new Latitude D810 Battery appeal of the HP ProBook or the Blu-ray drive of the Sony VAIO VGN-NS160, but a few features make it worth a look.

Next we ran our iTunes CPU test, during which the 1001P converted 11 MP3 files to AAC in 17 minutes and 51 seconds, the Dell Latitude D820 Battery fastest time by Pine Trail–equipped system.

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