8 best buys for essential gear

Pop quiz: Which would you rather have on a business trip, clean socks or your laptop? These days, clean socks are nice, but the laptop is indispensable, just as a desktop is at home, a camera is on vacation, and a cell phone is pretty much everywhere.

But tech is continuously in flux, so it's always the right time to upgrade your gear. Here's our look at today's best of the best: the top product in each of eight essential tech categories, including printers, hard drives, monitors, and HDTVs.

If you prefer to jump straight to our current charts, use the links below. To read about our picks, start on the next page.

Laptop

Monstrous desktop replacements and supersmall ultraportables exist, of course, but for us, the all-purpose laptop offers the best combination for anyone seeking a well-rounded notebook.

Our choice in this category best represents the delicate balance that considers cost, specs, and performance. The top-ranked portable on our all-purpose laptops chart right now is the US$1299 Micro Express JFL9226. This 6.6-pound model lacks the sleek lines and polish of its competitors, but it delivers the right mix of performance and features, for a good price.

Our test system, which came configured with a 2.53-GHz Core 2 Duo T9400 processor and 3GB of RAM, whipped through our WorldBench 6 tests as if the other members of the all-purpose laptop pack were standing still. Whether the task was to burn disc images or to encode video, no other model could keep pace; the JFL9226 earned an impressive score of 103 on the World­Bench 6 test suite. And it did all that while lasting almost 4.5 hours in our battery tests.

The next-fastest all-purpose laptop, Sony's VAIO VGN-SZ791N, scored nine points lower on the test suite but costs almost twice as much.

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