Corporate-style notebooks tend to pack a big punch underneath professional, slick but plain chassis. Sounds actually like a lot of corporate folks in their black and gray suits. The Acer TravelMate 6292 has all these bases covered for a business computer. It starts at about $1,800, and with add-ons hovers around that $2,000-plus range, which is just low-cost enough to help a middle-management type to convince IT to allocate the money on it.

For the price, Acer knows how to add value with a brainy interior in an otherwise staid exterior. Its processor is the Intel Core 2 Duo T7300 variety with 2.0GHz, 800MHz frontside bus, and 4MB of cache. That's fired up with 2GB of memory. For long-term parking, there's ample room in the Acer with its 160GB hard drive.

This TravelMate also offers all the wireless capabilities that businesspeople could use in a hotel lobby or in a meeting with the next greatest prospective client. The wireless is 802.11 a/b/g/Draft-N. Communication with PDAs and other handhelds can be managed through Bluethooth or infrared. Old-fashioned Internet connection can be had through Ethernet or even 56k modem. A PC Card slot could provide accommodation for most other types of accessibility, such as High-Speed Downlink Packet Access, or HSDPA.

Perhaps another prerequisite for a business notebook should be toughness. Of course, not all corporate laptops need to be able to withstand a plummet of epic proportions, but they should be able to hand a ding or a donk here and there. The Acer folks made sure that the TravelMate can do just that with its scratch-proof surface and hard-drive shock protection. Security is key too, so hoorah for the fingerprint scanner.

Some users could gripe about the 6298's OK 12.1 inch screen, or its awkward keyboard, or its stiff black design. Others might have aching shoulders from the extra few ounces on this oversized ultraportable. (It weighs in at about 4.5 pounds.)

But those people might not understand corporate IT, and the need to squeeze as much computer out of them as possible. A reasonably priced TravelMate laptop geared with all that a businessperson could need does the trick.