Road Warrior Laptop People who travel a lot with their laptops have certain criteria that are important to them. Typically, processing power and high-end graphics are at the bottom of the priority list. Rather, the typical uses for such notebooks are email, web surfing and the various word processing and spreadsheet applications. Light weight is the top priority for these users as well as a good build quality that can take a few hard knocks without falling apart. We would recommend a wide screen format for a road warrior laptop. This allows for 2 applications to be run side-by-side more easily -- something that we have found to be important to productivity while sitting in a hotel room far from home. To meet these requirements the middle of the road, price wise, is where you should select from. Neither top-end processing power nor top-end graphics are needed. Processing power changes constantly. What was the king of the hill a few months ago is now yesterdays news. Just about any modern production laptop out there has the processing power to do the above applications. Don't be fooled into thinking you need lots of power to run a spreadsheet and read an email. Your screen will look just as nice with a mid-level graphics card as with the high-end gaming graphics card. Neither your browser nor your word processing software will look or behave any differently. In terms of size and weight there are two size ranges that will work. There are the ultra-portable laptops that weigh less than 4 pounds and are around 10-11 inches in length. These notebooks sacrifice CD drives and ports for extra small size. They can easily be put into a small carry bag or briefcase and don't need a laptop bag to carry. While these machines are easy to carry the very small screens are hard on the eyes after long periods. Slightly larger are what are known as the lightweight notebooks. These range from 4-7 pounds and typically include larger screens and an integrated CD/DVD drive. Having traveled extensively with both we would recommend staying away from the extreme light weight models. While they were a joy to use at first, after a few months the small screen size became more and more frustrating. However, if you only use it for reading the occasional email on he road and a little web surfing it could work for you.   Road Warrior   General Purpose   Desktop Replacement