micro_express_jfl9227ALL-PURPOSE LAPTOPS come in a hodgepodge of sizes and shapes, a testament to just how much, and how quickly, notebooks are evolving right now. For this roundup we looked at small and spunky systems that are a smidgen too heavy to be considered ultraportables, as well as at laptops that have expansive, 16-inch screens but fall just short of qualifying as full desktop replacements.

Whether you want to save a few bucks or to obtain a perfect balance of power and mobility, you can find an all-purpose laptop to meet your needs.

While some of the portables in our Top 10 straddle a fine line between two diferent laptop categories, all of them offer some genuinely good value for your mobility bucks. Oat’s largely because the prices for laptops are plummeting—and they likely haven’t hit bottom yet.

You can see our complete chart of the top-ranked allpurpose laptops on page 50, but here’s a look at four new, recently tested models.

Acer TravelMate 6293

Before this tiny Acer portable came along, Lenovo had a lock on the all-purpose laptops category, offering notebooks adept at combining price and performance. Lenovo’s TinkPad SL400, which formerly occupied our number-one spot, ranks third this month, and it remains a solid deal, selling for a little over $1100. But shoppers can find plenty of reasons to choose Acer’s Travel Mate 6293 instead.

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For one thing, it has battery life in spades. Equipped with a powerful 7200-mAh battery, the 6293 lasted 3 minutes shy of 8 hours in our tests. That’s far better than the results we’ve seen from any other all-purpose machine on the market.

Performancewise, it rocks. The 2.26-GHz Core 2 Duo P8400–equipped unit with 2GB of RAM turned in an impressive WorldBench 6 score of 90. It lacks a dedicated video card (one unfortunate characteristic of small laptops), so its entertainment capabilities are limited by the shared video memory. Despite that, the 12.1-inch, 1280-by-800-pixel, wide-aspect display is fine for any other task you might need to squeeze into its small quarters. And the 250GB hard drive provides ample storage headroom.

You might not call the 6293 handsome, but this entirely black laptop is fairly well packaged for an allpurpose machine, al though it’s missing a Fire Wire port (which would have been handy for speedy digital downloads) and sports the older PC Card slot instead of a newer ExpressCard slot.

In the plus column, it does provide conveniences such as dedicated Bluetooth and 802.11n Wi-Fi switches, as well as a built-in Webcam. IT departments will love the fact that storage and memory are fully user-upgradable, too—and even the accounting folks should be able to tolerate the TravelMate 6293’s palatable $999 price.

Samsung X460

In the X460, Samsung has managed to craft a 14.1-inch, thin-and-light, all-purpose laptop that is perfectly roadready and can go toe-to-toe with some of the best ultraportables out there.

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That’s right: Because of its design, I’m leaning toward comparing this all-purpose laptop with lighter-class notebooks rather than with other all-purpose models. After all, the X460 comes incredibly close to qualifying as an ultraportable, weighing a mere 4.2 pounds.

The X460 is smartly priced considering what it oaers; our review configuration goes for $1699. Fat money buys you solid performance in the form of a 2.26-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 CPU, 3GB of RAM, and a discrete graphics processor. Although the GPU is no powerhouse—it’s a 256MB nVidia GeForce 9200M GS—it certainly helps the X460 give you better graphics performance than many thin-and-light machines do.

The 14.1-inch-diagonal backlit LED screen is amazingly bright, and the X460’s processing power and battery life shine, as well; in our PC World Test Center WorldBench 6 tests, it hit a very respectable score of 93, while its battery ran for a nice, long, 4.5-hour stretch.

The svelte case houses an optical drive and squeezes in a lot of ports, including VGA, HDMI, ethernet, three USB connections, a five-in one :ash memory card reader, an Express Card slot, and headphone/microphone jacks. Grow in 802.11n Wi-Fi, a 1.3-megapixel Webcam, and a fingerprint reader, and you wind up with a pretty robust package.

Gateway MC7803u

On the outside, the attractive Gateway MC7803u sure doesn’t look like it costs only a thousand bucks—but while using it, we quickly realized that Gateway had cut some corners. Since $999 clearly won’t net you the fastest laptop on the block, it’s no surprise that the MC7803u (with an Intel 2-GHz Core 2 Duo T5800 CPU, 4GB of RAM, and a 512MB AMD Radeon HD 3650 graphics processor) barely eked out a score of 78 in WorldBench 6. Gat kind of performance is average, but hardly capable of delivering a decent game experience on a portable.

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The MC7803u managed to survive 3 hours, 48 minutes on a single charge of the included battery—also about average for the all-purpose category. Gat result is a bit more impressive when you consider that the battery has to power the unit’s 16-inch glass display, but the screen is a little washed out.

The keyboard feels good, and the system’s overall layout is fairly sensible. Four USB ports occupy the sides, along with a five-in-one :ash card reader and a PC Card/ExpressCard slot; a pair of headphone jacks and one microphone jack occupy the front, and a Webcam resides atop the display. You also get VGA and HDMI video outputs, modem and ethernet connections, and Bluetooth and 802.11n Wi-Fi.

Weighing 7.7 pounds, the MC7803u is a little hefty for toting everywhere, but the price is a significant factor in making this laptop a solid contender. Just remember that, though it looks good on the surface, it makes some compromises that prevent it from being an entertainment notebook.

Dell Studio XPS 16

The Studio XPS 16 succeeds in outmuscling the slick but slightly flawed Gateway MC7803u, proving that you can emphasize style in a laptop without sacrificing functionality. Dell’s classy portable starts at $1199, and our review configuration costs roughly $1804—significantly more than the price tag on Gateway’s offering—but that premium shows in the Dell machine’s higher build quality and performance.

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Our review system had a 2.4-GHz Intel Core 2 Duo P8600 CPU, a 512MB ATI Mobility Radeon HD 3670 graphics processor, and 4GB of RAM, and it ran the 64-bit @avor of Windows Vista. That configuration notched a mark of 92 in our World Bench 6 test suite, exhibiting more than enough power to handle everyday tasks and some games, too; I had no problem playing Fallout 3 and Left 4 Dead at the screen’s native resolution of 1920 by 1080 pixels. For such results you can thank the capable mobile GPU and the 7200-rpm, 320GB hard drive, whose fast rotational speed enables better read/write performance during game play.

Images looked sharp on the laptop’s RGB LED screen, but the sound is a little flat and hollow. The Studio XPS 16 has a selection of nice input options around the sides: two USB connections and one shared eSATA/USB jack, plus DisplayPort, HDMIout, and VGA-out jacks. In addition, it offers a fourpin FireWire 400 port, a five-in-one flash memory card reader, a 2-megapixel Webcam, an ExpressCard slot, and a slot-loading Blu-ray Disc drive. Our review machine came with both a sixcell battery and a nine-cell battery for the price; while running on the latter, it survived for 3 hours, 41 minutes, which is about average for an all-purpose laptop.

Not only is the Studio XPS 16 packed with features, but it also boasts a reasonably sharp-looking design. Like the Gateway MC7803u, this laptop sports edge-to-edge glass on the display; the diference here is that Dell locks down the screen by bolting the hinges firmly into both sides of the bezel. In the end, even from just a quick glance at the two notebooks side by side, you can see what the price diference buys you.

Dell’s Studio XPS 16 is squarely aimed at people who want to get a little more for their mobile entertainment buck; it’s a solidly constructed multimedia laptop that piles on features without breaking the bank. nk8fwxv26q

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