Laptops that Make the Grade for Travel

I have talked to a number of business travelers to find out what specifications and options that they think make a specific laptop the "Best Laptop for Travel." The leading items that have been reported to me, as "Must Haves" in a laptop for travel are weight, overall size, speed including memory, hard drive size, and battery run time.

Weight is a huge factor when deciding on a laptop for travel, what makes a good laptop for travel is one that is less than 4lbs. This helps to keep the old laptop bag from being too heavy as one navigates through the long airport terminal hallways. Of the three laptops that I found to recommend as "Best Travel Laptop" the weight of each laptop was; Sony Vaio - 3.3 lbs, HP Elite book - 3.19 lbs and the Lenovo ThinkPad by IBM the lowest weight of the three at 2.29 lbs.

Next to weight, size was a factor in choosing the best laptop for travel. Many laptops are offering bigger and bigger screens, which are nice, but this does not work well while trying to accomplish work while on the flight. As the seats in the airplane become narrower and narrower, there is not much room these days for one's laptop. The laptops that we are comparing today have the following screen sizes; Sony Vaio - 13.1", HP Elite book - 12.1" and the Lenovo ThinkPad by IBM - 12.1" Plenty of room to view your documents while still fitting on the airline tray.

The executives that I spoke to wanted speed too, thus making this the third criteria in choosing the best laptop for travel. Not only did they want decent speed from the processor but also plenty of RAM to run their programs on the plane or during their meeting. Since memory and CPU power are closely related, I grouped them together for this third category. The Sony Vaio offers the 2.66 Ghz processor with a 1066Mhz data bus speed and 4 GB DDR3 memory, the HP Elite Book has the 2.13 Ghz processor running on the 1066mhz bus with 4GB DDR2 memory and the Lenovo ThinkPad by IBM offers a 2.13 Ghz processor with 4GB of DDR3 Ram.

Hard Drive space is a needed item in order to have the best laptop for travel. One needs space in order have all the files and presentation materials handy as well as multimedia items and videos for trainings, entertainment while flying and at the hotel room, and everyone wants access to their mp3 files for some good working music. The Sony Vaio offers a 320 GB SATA hard drive running at 7200RPM's, the HP Elite Book comes with the 160GB 5400RPM SATA Drive, and the Lenovo ThinkPad by IBM offers the 320 GB 7200RPM SATA drive. All will store your files and much more, the HP unit does offer an upgrade option to a larger hard drive.

Having enough battery life to make it through the day is another must from people who travel often, especially those going oversees and on long flights. Although these systems do not offer the longest battery life, they did come in rather high. In order to gain some of the other features that the traveling executives wanted, we had to sacrifice just a little bit on the battery usage. For the size, weight and speed I think you will still be impressed in the battery life. The Sony Vaio had the lowest battery life at 360 min or 6 hours, the HP Elite Book had the longest battery time of 480 minutes or 8 hours, and the Lenovo ThinkPad by IBM had a rather high battery life at 444 minutes or 7.4 hours.

Overall, three laptops that make the "Best Laptop for Travel," rating by the executives that travel with laptops on a daily basis whether for work and pleasure. There are other systems out there that offer similar features, options, battery life, and so forth, and for this article, it was hard to narrow the list to three. However, with that said I think it is hard to try to compare more than 3 to 5 laptops in one setting.

I am attaching a picture to this article, which has a grid of the different features that the above-mentioned laptops.