MSI X600

MSI X600

At first blush, the MSI X600 is intriguing. At 4.6 pounds with a 5400-milliamp battery, the X600 offers a truly full-size keyboard (including a separate numeric keypad) and a 15.6-inch, 1366-by-768-pixel screen driven by an ATI Radeon Mobility 4330 discrete graphics chip. Overall, that sounds like a pretty terrific combination, right? Well, there are a couple of warts.

A machine this big sporting Intel's Core 2 Solo low-power U3500 processor would be one of those oddities. This is a CPU you'd typically find in an ultralight laptop, like MSI's own X340. And while the X600 does sport a discrete graphics chip--something that certainly helps visual quality on DVDs--the actual pixel resolution is no more than that on the smaller, lighter X340.

HP ProBook 5310m

HP ProBook 5310m Ultraportable Laptop

HP has a thing of business-savvy beauty on its hands with the ProBook 5310m. Why do I say that? Even the guys in the PC World Labs--who see everything under the sun--were impressed by its industrial design. The sleek black aluminum case, the supple texture on the undercarriage...the list goes on. Me? I was impressed with the $699 starting price (the review unit in our office sells for $899). When they weren't ogling this slick, 13.3-inch, 3.8-pound, 0.9-inch-thin ultraportable, I grabbed the machine for my own testing.

Under the hood is Intel's Core 2 Duo SP9300 2.26GHz CPU, backed by 2GB of RAM and an integrated graphics processor. That's no scorcher, mind you, but it does run Windows 7 Professional and a few core programs (Office applications, photo editing software, and Web browsing, for instance) without balking. In fact, it has enough juice to cruise through PC WorldBench 6 earning a 99. Not shabby at all considering the size, weight and price. The battery life suffers as a result, lasting just a few minutes shy of 5 hours. Certainly better than the average all-purpose machine, but not the 6-to-7 hours advertised by HP spokespeople.

The 5310m adheres to that fine line between a computing status symbol (like, say, the HP Envy 13 or the Sony VAIO X series) and a reasonably powerful PC that actually lets you get your job done. And I'd daresay that the ProBook 5310m presents a more down-to-Earth alternative to Dell's fashionable Latitude Z600.