The Best Lightweight Laptop on the Market: Sacrificing power for convenience

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Ever since I bought my first laptop (a Zeos 386 running DOS in 1988), I've always bought the fastest and beefiest laptop available. When Clevo started distributing in 1998 the first desktop CU's in a laptop through DVLaptop I was happy. Being able to edit video and have the beef of a desktop in a portable laptop was awesome. Except for battery life and the weight. But for the performance, I was always willing to make those trade-offs. Up until 2002, I was more likely to spend the better of my days in Flash, Premiere, Photoshop, Illustrator and PowerPoint along with Office.

That's changed and now that I travel almost weekly, spend more time revising Agreements and trying to keep up with e-mail, the need for beef has melted away.

So it was with great pain I searched for a small lightweight puny wimpy feminine cream puff of a laptop. And then I demoed a Tablet PC and got hooked.

I looked at about five different Tablet PCs and immediately dismissed the slate style. The hybrid, while heavier, offered more versatility.

All of them are wimpy, but I ended up settling on the Toshiba for one reason only: SVGA 1400x1050 screen resolution. Having spent the last four years living life at UXGA 1600x1200, going down to VGA 1024x768 was like losing 75 percent of my desktop ability to multitask.

I'd say I spend 80 percent of my time in laptop mode; however, when I use the tablet functions, they rock.

I especially like Microsoft OneNote.

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