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When selecting a business notebook computer, most companies look beyond price and focus on features that are important to the mission-critical tasks of small-to-medium and even large companies. These include such things as the weight, physical size, communications capabilities and the power and speed of the system’s CPU. Durability is also important since many of these systems will be used by a mobile workforce and have to endure the bumps and bruises of business travel.

In terms of weight and the general form factor, it is best to find a system that balances the features and power you need with the overall heft of the system. Most business users will opt for a smaller LCD screen and a thinner form factor over a larger and more bulky multimedia system. Ideally, "road warriors" want the weight of their laptops to be about five pounds or less. Such safeguards as self-parking hard disks or SSDs are also desirable to protect business data an against minor bumps or drops that cause damage.

In general, the higher the storage drive capacity the better, especially since more business users are dealing with multimedia-rich files and large spreadsheets. A flash-based solid state drive is useful, since there are no moving mechanical parts, but a better and more flexible option might be a traditional or hybrid hard drive. Traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) are also much less expensive and can easily be swapped out, if necessary.

Many business notebooks have built-in security features, or even incorporate a GPS function to track stolen or misplaced laptops.  By far one of the more important features, however, is the system’s communications capabilities, which should include a built-in Ethernet port for wired connectivity, and support for multiple wireless technologies, including 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi, a cellular modem and Bluetooth short-range connectivity.

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