Note: This review is part of our Back to School 2008 roundup, covering specific configurations of popular laptops that can be found in retail stores.As middle-of-the-road as a laptop gets, Dell's Inspiron 1525 is an excellent go-to choice for basic ...

Adding some features missing form its 14-inch cousin, the Dell Inspiron 1525 is the textbook example of a midsize, mainstream laptop--a basic workhorse with few surprises. It may be a bit large for daily campus travel, but it should last you the full ...

We've long been fans of HP's Pavilion line of laptops, which combine an attractive design with media-friendly features at a fair price. By those criteria the Pavilion dv6915nr, a configuration available only in retail stores, is a no exception. It ...

The well-designed HP Pavilion dv6915nr incorporates most of the features you'll need for school, but other 15.4-inch laptops offer better performance for the same price.

Parsing the intended markets for Dell's ever-shifting in-house brand names requires a bit of tea-leaf reading, although it's been easier of late, with the company stripping down its consumer brands to just the Inspiron and XPS lines. Now the company ...

Once full of promise and impressive feats of engineering, the ultramobile PC category has fallen on hard times, outmaneuvered by a cheaper, more capable class of systems known as Netbooks or mininotebooks. Best exemplified by the popular Asus Eee PC, ...

Most low-priced laptops are bulky midsize systems with 15.4-inch screens. But the Gateway T-6828 offers a slightly more portable thin-and-light form factor with a 14.1-inch screen that's still comfortable enough for a full day of work. Aside from ...

The Asus M70 is the most fully loaded laptop we've seen in a long while. Aside from its massive terabyte of hard-drive space (enough to hold a few hundred movies or a few hundred thousand MP3s), the multimedia system incorporates a Blu-ray drive and a ...

Upscale, CE-like design ; full HD-resolution screen with handy automatic display settings ; Blu-ray drive and 1TB of storage ; multimode touch pad ; full complement of ports and connections ; decent battery life

Large and heavy ; 32-bit OS leaves 1GB of RAM sitting dormant ; midrange GPU does not offer top-notch gaming performance ; doesn't ship with a Media Center remote

You can find Blu-ray-equipped desktop replacements for less, but no other media laptop currently offers as many features for the price as the Asus M70.

From its chrome trim to its customizable case lighting, Alienware's Area-51 ALX high-end gaming desktop bears all the visual hallmarks of a luxury-class gaming PC. Our $7,738 review model came configured with Intel's highest-end Core 2 Extreme CPU, ...

Fastest gaming performance to-date ; fair pricing compared with other high-end PC vendors ; useful customizable case lighting

No 64-bit Vista option limits performance and memory support ; distinctive case design not for everyone

Alienware delivers most of what we expect in a high-end gaming PC, but without 64-bit Vista support, the Area-51 ALX's overall performance is limited. It's the fastest thing going for PC gaming, but at this price we expect the complete package.

The 17-inch Satellite P305 is part of Toshiba's recent rebranding of its mainstream Satellite laptop line. The new look and feel adds a shiny metallic sheen and a clever new Sleep-and-Charge feature, which lets you charge USB devices even if the ...

The Gateway M-1626 is a fixed configuration version of the manufacturer's midsize M series and is currently available through Office Depot. As with the M-1618 we reviewed last summer, we like the design of the Gateway M1626, which combines a lovely ...

Not to be confused with Averatec's GPS units of the same name, this Voya is a laptop and of the semirugged variety. With its rubber bumpers, the Averatec Voya 6494 bears a slight resemblance to Honda's original Element. Despite its clunky look, the ...