PC World — Your notebook means business in every sense of the word. The problem is, not everyone defines their work style the same way. Busy professionals crave an equally agile, lightweight laptop to fit their life in motion. Others need the brute force (and huge screens) that only a desktop replacement "portable" can provide. Then there is everyone else--people who want to combine reasonable power with the flexibility to go anywhere.

Most of us, though, no matter which kind of machine we favor, want to find that Zen state of great mobile performance and better battery life.

That's exactly what we're aiming to do here. Pouring over reams of data on products in our three laptop categories--namely, ultraportable, all-purpose, and power--we've sifted out our choice in each category for notebooks that offer the best balance of performance and endurance. Everything else is secondary. That means that money is not an object in this search for the best workhorse computers--although the reasonableness of the prices for two of our winning models will likely catch your attention.

Desktop Replacement (Power Laptop): Micro Express IFL9025

It's hardly a surprise that one of the more recent desktop replacement laptops to enter the Test Center wins out as the best choice. The Micro Express IFL9025 is one of the first Penryn-processor-loaded notebooks to roll off a factory line and into our offices.

The IFL9025 comes fairly well stacked with the hardware to garner high scores on our WorldBench 6 tests. Intel's 45-nanometer-based processor leads the charge with a 2.5-GHz Core 2 Duo T9300. This CPU, while not the fastest member of the Penryn family, had more than enough to handle any business task we could throw at the machine, delivering a downright impressive WorldBench 6 score of 97, tying it with Eurocom's D900C Phantom-X and just edging out Toshiba's high-end multimedia Qosmio G45-AV690 (which scored a 94). (Both are comparable desktop replacement machines.)

Besides business productivity, the other big reason to consider buying a desktop replacement is for its game-playing ability. The IFL9025, however, doesn't pack the most powerful 3D punch. It relies upon an nVidia GeForce 8600M GT video card with 512MB of dedicated memory. That's more than potent enough for games such as Far Cry that have kicked around for four years (the IFL9025 cracked 120 frames per second--a good score for an aging title such as Far Cry), while also being capable of dealing with what's on the store shelves today. Just don't expect to play games such as Crysis at top resolutions with all features cranked to "11." Gaming on most notebook computers entails a series of compromises. So tone down your expectations and keep the antialiasing features off.

All this said, we still have a stack of notebooks that haven't yet finished running the WorldBench gauntlet. One model in particular stands will likely best the IFL9025 in gaming performance: Alienware's Area-51M m15x. This notebook truly feels like a desktop replacement in that, besides having 4GB of RAM and a Penryn CPU, it uses two 8800m GTX graphics cards in Scalable Link Interface mode (SLI). That's right, a notebook that is brawnier than your average gaming desktop--no small feat.

As for battery life, one again needs to keep expectations in check with this sort of machine, as these PCs sponge power--and the longest we've seen a desktop replacement run on one charge is a little over 4 hours. Micro Express's IFL9025, however, is a close second in this respect, coming in at 3 hours, 53 minutes--about 12 minutes longer than the average for all desktop replacements.

What caught me off-guard, though, was how inexpensive (at US$1199) the IFL9025 is, considering how absurdly costly desktop replacement portables can be. Price may not be a factor in this story, but it's nevertheless hard to ignore a good deal when you see one.

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