The $249 Asus Chromebook C200 is helping me make peace with 11-inch Chromebooks. I understand they’re very affordable. I understand they’re easy to tote around the house or the schoolyard. I even understand that they're acceptable for basic browsing activities.
But the Asus Chromebook C200 also manages to be not quite as disappointing as some other low-end models I’ve tried. Its battery life is nice and long, too. In this compromise-ridden price range, the Chromebook C200 is one of the few decent choices.
Image: Michael Homnick The Asus Chromebook C200 has a matte-black lid that quickly becomes smudged with fingerprints.
The Chromebook C200 does have its shortcomings. Some of the things are little, like the ease with which the matte-black lid and even the textured-black bottom seems to pick up fingerprints (and I'm not munching potato chips or otherwise being extra-schmutzy). It has the hard-plastic keys that are sadly typical of many Chromebooks, though the travel seems less jarring than what I’ve experienced with other low-end models.
Some of its other shortcomings are more fundamental. The 11.6-inch LED-backlit display, with the usual 1366x768 resolution, has a shiny surface that picks up tons of reflection. The image quality and viewing angles are nothing special, either, and it's not a touchscreen. There's a 720p webcam over the display.
Image: Michael Homnick The island-style keyboard on the Asus Chromebook C200 well laid out, but the hard plastic keys are tough to type on.
Performance also disappointed us: The 2.42GHz Intel Bay Trail-M N2830 processor posted a wan Peacekeeper score of 1511, only a little better than HP’s Chromebook 11, which uses an Exynos ARM processor.
Some things about the C200 are just plain normal. It has 2GB of memory and 16GB of on-board storage. You get one USB 2.0 port and one USB 3.0 port, plus an HDMI port and an SD card slot. You even get a Kensington lock port. Asus also touts the larger size of its trackpad, though it wasn't a highlight for me.
Image: Michael Homnick You'll find a single USB 2.0 port and a Kensington lock port on the right side of the Asus Chromebook C200.
The speaker grille, nestled underneath the wide hinge, is wider than usual—some low-end laptops have ridiculously small speaker openings. Laptop speakers rarely deliver good sound, but the Chromebook C200's seemed to achieve a slightly better stereo effect. The volume range and sound quality were also slightly better than usual.
One thing is ready for the future: The Wi-Fi. The Chromebook C200 comes with an onboard 802.11ac Wi-Fi adapter, but it's currently limited to operating in 802.11a/b/g/n mode. At the time of this review's posting, Asus said Google was still working on a firmware update that will activate its 802.11ac functionality.
Image: Michael Homnick Ports on the left side of the Asus Chromebook C200 include headphone/mic, SD, USB 3.0, and HDMI 1.4, plus power.
Here’s the brightest spot with the Chromebook C200: battery life. According to Asus, the C200's 48-Watt-hour, 3-cell lithium-ion battery can support continuous video playback for up to 11 hours. Our benchmark is pretty tough, but the Chromebook C200 faced adversity with a smile, lasting 8 hours and 26 minutes on a full charge. This is a Chromebook you can use for a good, long stretch even if you ditch the AC adapter, and that could be all it needs to compete with other models in this price range—most of which have lasted closer to 4 to 6 hours in our tests.
I’ve found few low-end Chromebooks worth recommending, but the Chromebook C200 is one—mostly it’s for the battery life, but in various other ways, Asus has also managed to make this a noticeably better choice than others I’ve tried. It's a bargain with few regrets and one big, long-lasting bonus in the battery.
From PC World. Electronics product reviews and advice for best reference
Acer Aspire M (model M5-583P-6428) $700.00 Fans of large laptop touchscreens will appreciate the Aspire M’s roomy display, slim profile, and excellent battery life. The price-to-performance isn't bad either.
Acer's Aspire M performed well on our benchmarks, but it's not a barn-burner. 
ROBERT CARDINThe 15.6-inch display allowed Acer to fit a full-size keyboard, including a numeric keypad, into the Aspire M's chassis. 
ROBERT CARDINAlthough the Acer Aspire M is ultraslim, measuring just 0.7 inch thick, it weighs almost 5 pounds. 
Lenovo IdeaPad U430 Touch $700.00 This is one of the most affordable Ultrabooks we’ve seen, and the compromises Lenovo made to get there are not showstoppers by any stretch.
Lenovo’s IdeaPad U430 Touch is nearly twice as powerful as our reference notebook. 
Intel's integrated graphics processors are much better than the GPUs in its third-generation Core processors, but you'll still need more power than that if you want to play games. 
Battery life of 6 hours, 38 minutes is an impressive stat. 
Dell Latitude 3330 $561.00 Sleek and lightweight, the budget-priced Dell Latitude 3330 makes a good first impression. But it has difficulty running even the most routine multimedia—much less games—because of its bare-bones...
ROBERT CARDINDell’s Latitude 3330 doesn't deliver the performance its price tag warrants. 
The PCMark 7 Productivity element of our benchmark suite evaluates a system's performance with everyday office tasks. 
Our Notebook WorldBench 8.1 suite includes a broad array of benchmarks for evaluating a notebook's performance. 
ROBERT CARDINThe Dell Latitude 3330 is one of the lighter laptops we evaluated. 
The Asus Eee Pad Transformer TF101 tablet gets its name from the keyboard dock add-on that transforms the tablet into a laptop-like device. The Transformer TF101 Mobile Docking Station ($150 of March 7, 2012) is a must-have accessory for your Transformer, and not just because it gives you the ability to type on a physical keyboard.
At full brightness, the 13-inch MacBook Air’s screen measures an average of 285 lux. At 40-percent brightness (6 bars), it’s just 29 lux, but still very viewable. And brightness eats power.
Changing these settings will cause your Mac to power down energy-consuming components—such as the screen and the hard drive—sooner during periods of inactivity.
Occasionally, an app will consume an inordinate amount of system resources even when not in use. Not only does this impact your notebook’s performance, but it also seriously degrades battery life.
While it’s a great feature, the backlit keyboard on Macs can shave precious minutes off your runtime.
Your virus scanner and disk defragmenter, along with auto updates from the likes of Apple and Google, are scheduled to run themselves on a regular basis—often without your knowledge or consent. Set these tasks to run only on AC power so they don’t eat up precious juice running your hard drive, CPU and wireless while you’re unplugged.
Every USB peripheral attached to your notebook is eating up power just by registering itself with the operating system. By the same token, CDs, DVDs and Blu-rays can drain battery life, even when they’re just sitting idle in your optical drive. Remove any discs along with USB keys, card readers, modems or other peripherals you don’t need while on battery power.
The LED-backlit screens used on most modern notebooks expend less energy displaying black pixels than those showing colors. Setting your computer to show white and yellow text on a black background can improve battery life and even make text more readable when sunlight is hitting your screen.
While you’re surfing the Web, checking email or watching a movie, messaging apps such as Google Talk and Skype are hitting the Internet constantly, just to see which of your contacts are online and whether you’ve received any messages. Automatic updating apps from the likes of Adobe, Apple and Google may also be pinging the Internet to see if there are updates to your copies of Adobe Reader, Chrome browser or iTunes. To stop these silent power vampires before they start, prevent them from loading at boot time.