If you're set on a midsize laptop, one piece of advice we've offered for the past couple of years is to consider a 14-inch system, rather than a more common 15-inch one.
Dan Ackerman
Dan Ackerman leads CNET's coverage of computers and gaming hardware. A New York native and former radio DJ, he's also a regular TV talking head and the author of "The Tetris Effect" (Hachette/PublicAffairs), a non-fiction gaming and business history book that has earned rave reviews from the New York Times, Fortune, LA Review of Books, and many other publications.
"Upends the standard Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs/Mark Zuckerberg technology-creation myth... the story shines." -- The New York Times
The Asus U41JF is a workmanlike but uninspiring 14-inch laptop that offers decent performance and graphics and excellent battery life, but costs nearly as much as a MacBook.
Toshiba's holiday update of one of our favorite laptops, the Satellite E205, adds graphics and WiMax, but its higher price and lack of other new features prevent it from being a standout at the end of 2010.
The budget-minded Lenovo ThinkPad Edge 14 does its job as a solid small-business laptop, and Lenovo finally throws in a DVD drive, but it's too chunky compared with svelte competitors.
It costs a bit more than competing models, but the Lenovo ThinkPad T410 2522 offers a modern Core i5-based configuration inside a typical, rock-solid ThinkPad design.
