Review: Roundup: 4 Vista-Free Big-Screen Notebooks

Used to be buying a 15-inch notebook meant parting ways with at least two grand. Not anymore. Plenty of big-screen machines now offer up loads of features for prices well south of a thousand bucks. What's better, all of the laptops tested in this roundup have XP as an OS option — no need to "downgrade to Vista" before Windows 7 hits in a few months.

Roundup: 4 Vista-Free Big-Screen Notebooks

Learn How We Rate ##### Wired

Good general app performance, nearly as fast as the ThinkPad SL500. Exceptional value. Jumbo-sized hard drive. Lightweight.

Roundup:

• 1/10A complete failure in every way
• 2/10Sad, really
• 3/10Serious flaws; proceed with caution
• 4/10Downsides outweigh upsides
• 5/10Recommended with reservations
• 6/10Solid with some issues
• 7/10Very good, but not quite great
• 8/10Excellent, with room to kvetch
• 9/10Nearly flawless
• 10/10Metaphysical perfection

1. Lenovo ThinkPad SL500

It's something of a Porsche in the otherwise rarefied world of ThinkPad. With the SL500, Lenovo offers most of the line's high-end features while still landing at a rock-bottom price.

With its startling, glossy lid, the SL500 is initially only recognizable as a ThinkPad from to the logo in the corner (complete with glowing red LED dotting the "i"). But opening the laptop reveals many of the ThinkPad's signature features: a rock-solid, spacious keyboard, dual pointing devices and a comfortable selection of ports (four USB and even HDMI output). There's plenty more under the hood, too, including Bluetooth, integrated WWAN (AT&T) and GPS built right in. The 15.4-inch LCD also features LED backlighting, and there's even a 1.3-megapixel webcam above the screen. Speakers are loud and crisp, and screen brightness is about average for the category.

Really, what's not to like? With a 2.26-GHz Core 2 Duo, 250-GB hard drive, and 2 GB of RAM, the SL500 was a top performer among these XP-configured systems, though it suffers badly in one area: battery life. Its scrawny power pack pumped out a meager 90 minutes of DVD playback time, the worst in our roundup. How are we supposed to know how Slumdog ends?

Other than that, we found little to complain about Lenovo's base-level offering, which comes complete with XP pre-installed, not on a disc you have to use to downgrade yourself. And at $865, even the price makes us happy.

2. Fujitsu LifeBook V1040

Though hardly fascinating in design or features, Fujitsu's LifeBook V1040 is a capable 15-inch XP-ready laptop. And with a price tag of eight Benjamins, it skates close to the edge of netbook costs.

Though the design is a little weird (the optical drive is tricky to eject, and the ethernet connector is the sole port on the back of the machine, recessed and difficult to reach), the V1040 has most of what you expect in a modern laptop, including ExpressCard, an SD reader, Bluetooth and three USB ports. There's even a webcam, an oddity for a business-targeted computer, and the keyboard is spill-proof.

Under the hood, specs are solid: A 320-GB hard drive (the biggest in this roundup) is the centerpiece, and Fujitsu makes up for the 2-GHz Core 2 Duo chip (which is both slower and hotter than the competition) with a full 3 GB of RAM. Somehow this machine (perhaps the all-plastic design) lets it weigh in at a scant six pounds, 0.4 pounds less than the ThinkPad SL500.

Our big complaint with the V1040 is that downgrading to XP was a massive pain that took an entire day. The recovery disc wouldn't work until we reformatted the drive (which completed only after dismissing several errors), partitioned it and ran the recovery from scratch. A second disc is then required to install all the drivers, followed by an epic Windows Update session.

3. Panasonic Toughbook CF-52

So a 15-inch notebook that costs over $1500 that's also shielded to deflect small arms fire may not seem like a natural fit for this roundup. But really, can you find a notebook this tough with these specs that also loads XP? Yeah, we couldn't either.

The CF-52 is actually a quite capable little (er, not-so-little) machine. Normally going "rugged" means making a lot of tradeoffs in the realm of slower chips and stripped-down specs, but the CF-52 is surprisingly state-of-the-art. It features the same processor — a 2.26-GHz Core 2 Duo — as most of competitors, plus an acceptable 2 GB of RAM, and 160 GB of hard disk space (smallish, but not netbook-tiny).

Benchmark scores are top-notch; the CF-52 actually outclassed by a slim margin everyone in this competition at general application performance, and gaming was even workable on the machine. And battery life: Unimpeachable. We got over five hours of run time out of the Toughbook, even at maximum LCD brightness.

Of course, while the 15.4-inch machine has plenty of power, sacrifices have to be made in other departments. Most obvious is size and weight — the CF-52 is hugely bulky due to the rugged design and extra internal padding, and it's over a pound heavier than the Fujitsu V1040.

The other big problem is the price: At $1,700, it's fully twice as expensive as most of the competition, making it truly approachable only to fat-walleted military types who need all of its military-class protection features.

WIRED Excellent performance and unmatched battery life (over three times longer than most of the competition). Surprisingly bright LCD. Four USB ports (all covered with snap panels, natch). Fully ruggedized, with shock-mounted, spill-proof, sand-slaying components. Optioned for XP pre-installed, no mucking with Vista required.

TIRED Ungodly expensive versus the field. Design will get you laughed out of Starbucks. Yay for the serial port. Hyperactive fan. Crummy touchpad buttons.

$1,700 (as tested), panasonic.com

4. Toshiba Satellite Pro S300

A dowdy hunk of metal and plastic, the Satellite Pro S300 gives you a small hard drive coupled with lackluster performance (25 percent slower than the Lenovo ThinkPad SL500) and then charges you more than the competition for the machine.

From a feature standpoint, the S300 has plenty going for it: Three adjacent USB ports and a combo USB/eSATA port on the opposite side of the machine. There's a webcam up top, Bluetooth built in, an SD card slot and the screen is super-bright, too.

It's really a tragedy performance is so sluggish. Applications lag and stutter before finally doing what you ask them to do. (Maybe it's the absurdly loaded system tray that's at fault — we counted 18 icons plus two search boxes after a fresh install.) The S300 also suffers from horrid, horrid audio; it's difficult to hear from a mere six feet, even at max volume. Obsolescence alert: There's a PC Card slot from in lieu of the newer ExpressCard plus a serial port. Seriously. Why this machine costs $200 more than Fujitsu's V1040, we can't really explain.

Vista comes pre-installed on the S300, and you're required to downgrade to XP yourself. Luckily this is a fairly painless process on the Satellite. Maybe that's not such a bad thing. A machine like this that features such a strang

e mishmash of dated technology, we kind of expected we'd be upgrading from Windows ME.

WIRED Brightest screen in this category. Exceptional battery life: Nearly 2 1/2 hours. Serial port means you can finally hook up your CueCat to something again.

TIRED Sad performance numbers; visibly sluggish despite decent specs. Expensive versus the competition. Puny hard drive.

$1000 (as tested), toshiba.com

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