Satellite Pro L300D EZ-1003X

It may not be the least expensive or the most powerful, but Toshiba's Satellite Pro L300D is good for road warriors who like to travel light but stay within a budget. The price that you pay for this ease of travel is a small hard drive and lack of support for 802.11n wireless networks.

Housed in a nondescript gray-and-black case, the Satellite Pro L300D weighs in at 5.7 lbs., equal to the Vostro 1510. With its AC adapter, the system has a reasonable travel weight of 6.8 lbs. Its 14.3 x 10.5-in. footprint roughly matches the other three notebooks in this group, but the Satellite Pro L300D is 1.5-in. thick, quite a bit thicker than the Vostro 1510.

The Satellite Pro L300D uses AMD's 2.1-GHz Turion X2 processor with 2GB of system memory and a 160GB hard drive. The system's ATI Radeon X1250 graphics can use up to 700MB of the unit's complement of RAM; the 15.4-in. display has a maximum resolution of 1280 x 800. The system is rounded out with a DVD Super Multi optical drive that works with just about every disc short of a Blu-ray movie.

The competent keyboard has 18.9mm keys with 2mm of depth, but it flexes too much under intense work. Above is a webcam that has a resolution of 310,000 pixels, well short of the 1.3 megapixel resolution that some of the others can handle. On the other hand, the Satellite Pro L300D has some nice hardware details, such as a mechanical volume thumbwheel and a Wi-Fi on/off switch (making it easy to save battery life by quickly switching off Wi-Fi).