What you should look for in a laptop:

Processor: Intel's Pentium M, AMD's Turion 64, and Apple's PowerPC G4 processor offer business users the best balance between performance power, battery life, and weight. For less demanding computing, an Intel Celeron or an AMD Sempron processor will do the trick.                                    Bare Minimum Regardless of what kind of processor you decide on, you'll need at least 1.73GHz of processing speed.

Memory: You'll want enough memory to run a few applications at a time. The more memory you buy up front, the longer your laptop will be able to handle current (and future) applications.                            Bare Minimum 512MB

Video Card:For most business users, video memory is one area where you can afford to cut corners. Unless your system will be doubling as a gaming machine, you don't need to shell out extra money for a high-end card with its own memory.                                                                                                   Bare Minimum: An integrated graphics card that shares memory with the system chipset.

Hard Drive :E-mail archives, spreadsheets, and Word documents add up. If you plan to carry music and video on your system, consider 80GB or more.
Bare Minimum 60GB, 5,400rpm.

Optical Drive:The least-expensive laptops come with fixed drives that cannot be removed. A swappable drive bay offers more flexibility: you can easily pull out a CD-ROM drive and swap in a combo DVD/CD-RW drive.
Bare Minimum: If you're totally indifferent to the prospect of mobile movie watching, a CD-ROM drive will get the job done. But we strongly recommend upgrading to a CD-RW/DVD combo drive, which will let you burn CDs and watch DVDs.

Screen Size: Depending on the type of work you do, you'll want to make sure your screen fits the job. Graphics and spreadsheet tasks call for larger screens, while e-mail requires very little space.              Bare Minimum 12 Inches

Weight: A few ounces here, a few ounces there--carry your laptop around the airport for an afternoon, and it all adds up. You may be tempted to get a larger notebook that seemingly offers more bang for the buck, but trust us: for the business user, less is more.                                                                            Ideal Range: 4 to 6 Pounds

Battery: Laptop batteries don't last as long as they should. Even the best-performing systems top out at about six hours, and most last half as long.

Networking Today's business demands online connectivity. All laptops come with an Ethernet connection, and almost all come with built-in wireless connectivity. You'll want both. If work takes you away from both office and hot spot, you can buy a laptop with an integrated WWAN card, which connects to a cellular data network--but that feature can be quite costly.

Ports and Connections: The most sophisticated laptops feature advanced audio and video connections, such as digital-media card readers, S-Video outs for connecting to a TV, a DVI port for connecting to digital LCD monitors, and a FireWire