Proof you can have your 3-pound cake and eat it too.

When you pick up a Lenovo ThinkPad X300, you pick up 3 pounds, 6 ounces of excellence. In every way that the MacBook Air is stylish and beautiful, the X300 is built to perform. No usability is sacrificed for visual appeal—inside this unassuming black chassis is a workhorse. It sounds like an oxymoron, but this is one sturdy 3-pound portable.

Weighing a tad more than 4 pounds, Sony’s Vaio SX is the heftiest laptop in the ultraportable category. Yet despite its larger size, the Vaio isn’t the sturdiest small-size contender. That’s too bad because this little rig packs killer performance in its sexy carbon-fiber shell—it’s the only ultraportable we tested that includes discrete graphics.

Your IT department won’t let you copy MP3s onto your work PC, and your iPod won’t hold your massive music collection, but you need to listen to tunes while you toil away at the day’s labor. What’s an audiophile to do? The answer is simple: Stream the collection you have stored on your rig at home to your PC at work.

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At Maximum PC, our main concern is speed—we like to call it pure PC power. But, as much as we love the massive power available in the desktop replacement notebooks of today, our shoulders just won’t let us tote those über-powerful, über-heavy rigs any further than from the sofa to the fridge and back. Even worse, high-powered, ultra-portable rigs are just too damn expensive. And it’s tough to pay more than $2000 for a machine with integrated graphics, even if it weighs only 3 pounds.

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