Dell Notebook

The Dell Latitude D-610 model is far more adept and powerful than its predecessor, the Latitude D-600. That said, on the surface, the D-610 and the D-600 look remarkably similar. Like its predecessor, the D-610 boasts a slim and easy to carry design. It's only 1.2 inches thick and 12.4 inches wide.

The D-610 Latitude weighs in at 5.4 pounds--tack on another pound or so for the three-pronged adapter. The ample keyboard size and silver design make this model both accessible and nice to look at. Although the D-610 laptop lacks some on-keyboard multimedia buttons, most business-class computer users prefer to use touch and click controls anyway.

The most exciting feature associated with the Dell D-610 is its Sonoma chip set, fresh from its January 2005 Intel rollout. Thanks to the Sonoma, the D-610 delivers faster performance and much easier data processing. Customization is the name of the Dell notebook game. You can tack on features to the D-610 and even "supe up" with an advanced ATI Mobility Radeon graphics card--with a devoted video memory of up to 64 MB.

The D-610 battery gives relatively long life--approximately four hours and change--but it doesn't perform that much better than the D-600 battery. Invest in a spare battery, particularly if you do a lot of business traveling. The D-610 Latitude supports four separate USB 2.0 ports, which may seem excessive, except when you consider that most of today's advanced add-on devices connect vis-à-vis USB.