The great weight conundrum

Most manufacturers don't tell the whole truth when they advertise weight

Emil Larsen, Personal Computer World 05 Dec 2007

We often get complaints about advertised notebook weights being very different to the actual weight. We’ve gone through product brochures and websites, to find what the manufacturers say their notebook weighs and then compared them with our own measurements.

Usually in group tests we weigh notebooks on our Lab scales that are accurate to 50g. This time, however, since weight was such a big issue we’ve used a set of high-end Pitney Bowes scales. Designed for franking mail, these scales are accurate down to 1g.

The table below shows manufacturers’ claimed weights (power adapter not included) along with what they weighed on our scales.

The most common weight advertised is with a battery, which can often lead to disappointment when you realise your notebook weighs half a kilo more with the power adapter - something most of us tend drag around wherever we go anyway. But even without the power adapter we found most manufacturers exaggerated their physiques.

Bizarrely, the Panasonic Toughbook CF-W7, Lenovo Thinkpad X61 and Toshiba Portégé R500 actually weighed less on our scales than advertised. The difference is so low that an individual stick of Ram, different capacity hard drives, or the accuracy manufacturers are weighing to, could explain the difference.