Toshiba won't mind if we say that their previous business class notebooks looked...kind of cheap. They were bulky and unattractive, largely feeling like consumer notebooks with matte instead of glossy plastic. Yet when we visited with Toshiba to talk about their Tecra refresh, we were impressed, and Toshiba's reps were only too happy to put the new Tecras next to the old ones to demonstrate the stunning new weight loss plan the notebooks were put on. And the best part? While the Tecras have gotten a healthy refresh, their prices remain remarkably affordable. Is the 15.6" Tecra R850 the notebook you've been looking for?

A little over seven months ago, we took at look at a Clevo X7200 courtesy of AVADirect that featured a desktop hex-core processor and a pair of NVIDIA's then-fastest mobile graphics cards, the GeForce GTX 480M. Since then NVIDIA has refreshed their mobile top end, and while we hope to review the GTX 485M in SLI soon, in the meantime we have another pair of mobile parts that have been making waves: the AMD Radeon HD 6970M.

This is still the same chassis, of course, so if you didn't like the X7200 concept the first time around the updated GPUs aren't going to radically alter the equation. But assuming you're after the most powerful notebook currently on the market, let's see if we can set a few more performance records.

It's too cliché to proclaim netbooks are dead. Perhaps the appropriate phrase is netbooks are no longer interesting to write about, but they do have a roadmap going forward. For years we heard about convergence in the PC and consumer electronics space. Convergence has finally reached mainstream, but the process isn't over yet. The smartphone revolution is the beginning of a much larger convergence. A melding of computing devices, convergence between the smartphone and tablet, or the tablet and notebook PC. The smartphone will become even more PC-like and the tablet will become even more notebook-like. But where does that leave PCs?

The PC needs to evolve as well, and as we've learned in the past, software enables hardware and hardware enables software. The PC's changing role in the future also requires some new thought about hardware design and what sort of decisions microprocessor manufacturers are going to make going forward. Today Intel is announcing the first step in that evolution, an announcement that we actually first heard about from another company a year ago. Read on to learn about Intel's Ultrabook.

Choosing a laptop can be a pretty confusing experience, because even if you have a good idea of what features and components you’d like, finding a laptop with them isn’t always easy. Once you do find the right features, you have to decide if you like the way the notebook looks, and in the mobile gaming world that often means living with a lot of gloss and bling, or going for the polar opposite with a dull black plastic shell. We have two gaming notebooks that happen to fall squarely into those categories, but there’s a lot more to the packages than that simple description.

Can MSI or CyberPower (Clevo) put together a midrange notebook that will wow us and walk away with your gaming dollar? If not, where do they come up short? Read on to find out.

Ever since getting to visit with HP back in February, we've been anxious to get one of their refreshed enterprise-class notebooks in house. The aluminum styling is such a smart blend of professionalism and straight up good looks, it's almost a shame we aren't going to see it on consumer-oriented notebooks. Now we have one of their new 14-inch models on hand, the EliteBook 8460p, featuring a dual-core Sandy Bridge processor and new AMD Radeon HD 6470M graphics. Is it everything we hoped for?

As a matter of course we tend to spend a lot of time focusing on the gaming potential of the hardware we review. Boutique desktops get a lot of love, and it's always interesting to see just how much power you can pack in a portable solution. Many users simply don't game, yet they still need a powerful machine for other tasks like video or photo editing. In the world of Intel's first-generation Core i7 line, that meant getting a notebook with a battery eating graphics card you just didn't need. Sandy Bridge changes all that with integrated graphics suitable enough for most tasks, and today, CyberPower has offered us a notebook targeted to a slightly different segment than usual: the IGP-powered, 1080p and quad-core-wielding Xplorer X6-9100.

We've already looked at both dual-core and quad-core Sandy Bridge laptops with IGP graphics, but how does this laptop stack up in other important metrics like battery life, design, and build quality? Read on to find out.

Toshiba has spent the last half a decade carving out an interesting niche as a notebook manufacturer, with many consumer-grade notebooks that are ostensibly budget offerings but often feature a markedly different look and feel from the kinds of laptops vendors like Dell, HP, and Acer produce to serve this market segment. Oftentimes they can feel stylistically behind the curve, but every so often they produce a big winner as they did with their Portege R700 series.

Now, a trickle-down of style couples with modern hardware in a respectable new entrant in their venerable Satellite line: the M645. Our review unit features a shiny new Sandy Bridge mobile dual-core processor along with a healthy amount of memory, an Optimus-enabled NVIDIA GeForce 500M series GPU, and a Blu-ray combo drive, all in a reasonable 14-inch chassis. But it threatens to set you back a grand: is it worth it?

One of our favorite mainstream notebooks last year was Dell’s XPS 15—provided you purchased the upgraded 1080p LCD. It managed to hit the market before talk of Sandy Bridge completely eclipsed the outgoing Arrandale offerings, and it provided a good blend of performance, battery life, build quality, and most important price. There are other laptops with good LCDs floating around, but try finding a high-quality 1080p LCD in a laptop for under $1000. That’s what the original L501x provided; now Dell has upgraded the design with Sandy Bridge processors.

Outwardly, very little has changed, so if you liked (or disliked) the original then you’ll probably feel the same with the L502x. However, the CPU change brings quite a few other tweaks along for the ride. Previously, the XPS line had versions with dual-core Arrandale CPUs and an Optimus-enabled GPU, or you could upgrade to a quad-core Clarksfield processor and get a GPU upgrade as well, unfortunately losing out on Optimus in the process. Sandy Bridge CPUs come in both dual-core and quad-core varieties, and since all of them come with Intel’s latest IGP they all support Optimus. That’s the good news, but is there a downside? Read on for our full analysis.