Digital Home Thoughts: HP Pavilion dv3z is Happily Middle of the Road

"Affordable and lightweight laptops are few and far between: You'd have to settle for either a netbook or a desktop replacement laptop in order to spend less than $1,000. I'd like to see more systems that don't skimp on screen real estate yet are still relatively light, in the range of 4 to 5 pounds. The HP Pavilion dv3z ($980 direct), a 13-inch lightweight beauty, easily meets these criteria while keeping prices in the three-digit range. The only catch is that you'll have to settle for AMD parts, which, unfortunately, aren't as fast as their Intel counterparts. If your workloads are as light as this system, however, performance shouldn't matter."

This is the sweet spot for a lot of users. If you are looking for small, but not too small and need some power, but not too much power, and need something inexpensive, but not super inexpensive, then you are the target market.