<p>I am looking for a light weight laptop. I will be using it primarily when I travel. Im tired of lugging around my current laptop :(. It is heavy and the charger is also heavy. Please help. TIA</p>
<p>I have a MacBook Air and I LOVE LOVE LOVE it! It weighs 3 pounds.</p>
<p>What sorts of things will you be doing with it? Movies? Microsoft Office? Games? Web browsing? Email?</p>
<p>I have a 17 inch MacBook Pro and bought a Dell XPS M1330 for traveling. It’s 4.4 pounds and fairly small. It’s very nice except for Vista which is a POS Operating System. But I get by with it.</p>
<p>If I had it to do over again, I’d get the new MacBook. Thin, light, lots of CPU horsepower and Mac OSX over Windows. I had a look at the MacBook Air when they came out (lots of various Macs at the office) but didn’t like the missing pieces compared to the MacBook and MacBook Pro models back then.</p>
<p>I just got a Dell inspiron - and managed to make Vista look and operate like XP pretty quicklly. Close and disable those stupid Mac-wanna-be graphics and it’s your familiar interface .
Light and cute and they even make mice in matching colors! Be sure to get the firewire - I didn’t and am stuck with the little USB thing sticking out the side to use my mouse.</p>
<p>Well, I need to be up on operating systems in general and I’d rather leave them in. I have a coworker that says that Vista flies on a quad-core 2.8 Ghz Penryn system with very high-end graphics cards.</p>
<p>And I’m spoiled by Mac OSX - I don’t have to have the wannabe - I use the real thing (except when I’m on the road). Dell’s XPS line usually comes with a lot of standard equipment - mine had 4 GB RAM, Vista Premium 64-bit, video camera, remote control, Linux partition for fast boot to play media, Bluetooth, Wireless, SD reader, etc. I needed something quickly for a trip and grabbed this from Best Buy. If the current MacBook was available before the trip, that would have been the purchase.</p>
<p>Sony Viao here. Really thin and small. Battery lasts forever. Maybe 2 lbs? Keyboard is a bit tight if you have big hands though.</p>
<p>Although D loves MACs I have only used windows. I think I could adjust if it meant a nice light weight laptop. Since I mainly need it to get on-line when Im travelling, Id like to not spend a fortune. I want the laptop and the charger to be light weight.</p>
<p>I have the Vaio, too. It weighs a kilo. But, it was not cheap and I hate Vista. There are all these tiny Acers and similar things flying around now- so cheap. If I had been buying now this is what I would have purchased.</p>
<p>Sons x2 have lightweight Acers (don’t know exact model) but both are very satisfied. Oldest son had a Dell, nothing but problems!!</p>
<p>The new models are called netbooks or nettops. They’re typically small, light and have good battery life. They typically use Intel’s new Atom chip which is a miser on power with okay performance. Dell has a model that’s 9 or 10 inches that looks attractive to me. Similar to the XPS but smaller. They’re probably fine for surfing the web but I like laptops with a decent amount of horsepower.</p>
<p>If you have really good eyes or need only occasional use you could just use something like an iPhone. If you take it to an extreme you could also use it to remote into your full-fledged PC back at home/office via a VPN tunnel.</p>
<p>I’ve eye’d the Sony Vaio small laptops a few times. They’re lightweight but expensive.</p>
<p>You could also get one of the small Dells equipped with either Linux or Windows XP - 8.9" display, 2.28 lbs. They start at around $345.
[Dell</a> Laptops / Notebooks: Colorful laptops, small laptops, light weight laptops, gaming laptops](<a href=“http://www.dell.com/home/laptops?~ck=mn#subcats=&navla=&a=51808~0~812591]Dell”>http://www.dell.com/home/laptops?~ck=mn#subcats=&navla=&a=51808~0~812591)</p>
<p>I think one of these small inexpensive Dells might be a good option for you. I haven’t actually used one though.</p>
<p>The advantage to using something with an Intel Atom chip over an ARM device like the iPhone is x86 compatibility. Firefox in particular will be adding a nanojit engine in their next release (due early 2009) which targets x86. The iPhone is a nice device but I can’t imagine VPN back to my office to do engineering work.</p>
<p>I’m waiting for reviews from friends that have them on order. They report a big backlog for the little devices. These sorts of devices are targetted at developing countries and even Intel’s CEO said that they wouldn’t be devices that you or I would use (this was at a conference call) as we generally expect a certain level of performance. I’m not so sure about that overall. But I personally find that a 1.8 Ghz C2D on a laptop is the low-end for me running XP or Mac OSX. I think that I’d want something like a 2.4 Ghz C2D to run Vista. Unfortunately I have a 2.0 Ghz C2D to run Vista. I can live with it but those new MacBooks look awfully good for traveling right now.</p>
<p>
I said it with a bit of tongue-in-cheek but there have actually been a few times when even on an iPhone it would have been handy to VPN into a work server to see directly what’s going on verus having to walk someone else’s fingers through it. I can see myself doing this on occasion - mostly when I’m on vacation and don’t have a laptop with me. It’d be more for poking around and seeing what’s happening - not for writing code or anything - I can’t imagine that on something like an iPhone.</p>
<p>I don’t actually have an iPhone but I’m thinking about getting one. </p>
<p>If the OP wants a small lightweight laptop for almost exclusively web browsing, I think a small low-end laptop should suffice. The best bet would be to find one in a store and do a few minutes of browsing with it to see if it performs well enough. I wonder how one of those little Dells with Ubuntu and Firefox on it would perform.</p>
<p>We have an iPod Touch and it’s great for use on-the-go but there are limits to web-browsing.</p>
<p>For place of purchase, I’d prefer either going with the Apple Store or with an online place with onsite repair. I bought my XPS from Best Buy and there was a keyboard issue. They took two weeks to get it back to me. People with Dell onsite services (common if you order through small business) typically bring it into the office and schedule a repair appointment and the tech fixes it while you wait. You don’t have to drive to the store, wait in line for the Geek Squad guy, wait to get your unit shipped to who knows where with people maybe looking at your data, and then wait for it to come back to you. I had a warranty repair on one of our MacBook Pros and they took 1 week for the depot repair. They have a faster service available too but I was okay with a week. The service experience at Apple Stores is generally excellent. Strangely enough, I’ve heard that it’s a lot better than the service experience when buying from their online store.</p>
<p>Daughter loves her Macbook Air.</p>
<p>Thinkpad X series</p>
<p>I have an Acer Aspire. Very small, and about 2.5 lbs., about 8 in x 5 in. It has wireless, webcam and 1 Gig Ram, and uses Windows XP. I use Skype to talk to people when I need to, using wireless. </p>
<p>The Aspire one is slow, not something I will use everyday.</p>
<p>I have an Ipod Touch and that works well when traveling too.</p>
<p>S1 just bought the Acer Aspire for travel and daily use on campus. He likes the lighter weight and size, but says the screen is too small for “all day” usage. He uses it for email and word docs mostly. Keeps his larger dell laptop in his dorm room.</p>