Decided to pick up a Toshiba M645. Price $999. The base specs are: Intel® Core™ i5-2410M, 6GB DDR3-1333 RAM, 640GB 5,400RPM Hard Drive, 14.0″ LED HD Display, Blu-ray Disc ROM and Labelflash SuperMulti DVD Drive, Memory Card Reader, Backlit Keyboard, NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 525M, 10/100 Network, 802.11b/g/n Wireless, Bluetooth 3.0 + EDR, Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium (64-bit). What I basically wanted was a small laptop that was actually capable of playing World of Warcraft on ultra settings at excellent frame rates. It also needed to be able to play other games at high or near high settings. So far this tiny sandy bridge notebook delivers. It’s the first time in a sub $1000 notebook that I’ve not felt gimped in the field when it comes to games or computing power. There is a video on youtube where a guy put an SSD into one and it screams. It gets decent battery life for what it is. It’s no macbook air, it’s not groundbreaking in terms of looks, but its a great overall little computing powerhouse you can game on in the field. It runs cool even when gaming, backlit keyboard and the ability to turn off the trackpad is nice. I was worried about the Core i5 since I normally only get whatever the latest processor offering is (i7 at the time of this writing) but for the price I’m impressed with it’s performance for my needs. A true little brother to the 18 inch, desktop replacement style Toshiba X505 which is a great machine, but the X505 does not fit into my Pelican laptop overnight case 🙂