best ultra portable laptops

Only three gigs of RAM, so I upgraded to eight, because I like to have both Lightroom and Photoshop with Word open and my music playing all at the same time without any slowdown and I've got some big files, so more RAM was necessary for me.

Having USB 3.0 now is nice since hard drive sustained transfer speeds have long outpaced USB 2.0 and Firewire.

Even without the solid state drive (I used it for 2 days without ssd), the performance was satisfactory, with the SSD though, this little machine is a beast.

Optical drives, while still useful, are far from essential these days - most games can be bought and downloaded online, as can a lot of video content.

The build of the computer is solid and portable, and the absence of an optical drive makes this possible.

I like the screen size, too, but my roommates complain that it is too small to watch a movie in a group.

I purchased a SATA III SSD knowing that this netbook only supports SATA II speeds.

Click to enlargeShooting for start speed rather than processing power, the Chromebook is powered by a 1.66-GHz dual-core Intel Atom N570 CPU, 2GB of RAM, a 16GB SSD hard drive, and integrated graphics.

You're limited to 100MB of free data a month for two years under the terms of the deal provided with this Chromebook, but you can buy extra 3G data as needed.