best ultra portable laptops

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

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.

Nor can you simply drag files across to an SD card, even when in the File Manager viewing window.

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.

The XPS 12 ($1,199 as tested) uses the same innovative flip-screen design as the 2010 Inspiron Duo, but now it's paired with a Windows 8 experience that's optimized for touch.

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.