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WHAT'S HOT: Need a notebook that works unplugged all day on one battery charge? The Toshiba Tecra M1 comes close: Its single lithium ion power pack carried it through 6 hours, 29 minutes of work in our tests--just 9 minutes shy of the record set by its near-twin sibling, the Tecra S1 we tested last June.
If you need even more time, you can swap out the optical drive (a DVD-R/RW/RAM model in our system) from the M1's expansion bay and replace it with a $169 secondary battery. Or, you can use the modular bay to boost storage instead by swapping in a second hard drive ($428 for 60GB, including a required adapter). With the included dummy module in the bay, the notebook's weight drops from 7.1 pounds to 5.6 pounds. An SD memory card slot and dual pointing devices round out the M1's conveniences.
WHAT'S NOT: The M1, with a PC WorldBench 4 score of 113, lagged well behind the five other 1.6-GHz Pentium M-equipped notebooks we've tested so far (all of which scored 122...