Ultraportable laptops are supposed to be thin and light and the U36JC certainly delivers on thin, at just .75 inches thick. It's a little more challenged on the light part: At 3.8 pounds, it's fairly heavy for an ultraportable. The U36JC is attractive, though, with a graphite black magnesium-aluminum alloy chassis.

The 2.53 GHz Core i5 processor delivered a score of 111 in our PCWorld Lab testing. That's a solid score for an ultraportable in this price range. And the laptop's switchable graphics with a NVIDIA 310M discrete graphics card produced impressive gaming scores for this category.

The U36JC has lots of connection options, including one USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports, an HDMI connection and VGA port.

Video looked great on the U36JC's 1366-by-768-pixel screen -- as long as I didn't have a bright light behind me. The screen is particularly glossy and reflective, meaning that when I got to a dark scene in "Kick-Ass," the experience was a bit like looking in a mirror. But colors popped on the screen, it handled motion well and the image still looked great when I looked at the screen from an extreme angle. Unfortunately, the nicest thing I can say about the laptop's sound is that it's just fine with decent headphones. The built-in speakers sound boxy and thin.

The keyboard on the U36JC feels great. It has chiclet keys with a fairly long travel and good feedback. The touchpad, on the other hand, is a horror show. While it accepts gestures like a two-fingered scroll, I often found I had to make the gesture twice before the notebook would respond. And the button below the trackpad is really difficult to use. Clicking it requires the force of a jackhammer and it's so narrow vertically that it's hard to find by feel.