Give credit to Intel for recognizing that the notebook market needed a swift kick in the pants, and for putting a noose around the necks of netbooks, which have all but been eliminated from the market place. Sure, a few straggling netbooks remain, but by and large, Intel is now heavily invested (both literally and figuratively) in the Ultrabook platform. These thin and light machines represent the natural evolution of laptops, and the form factor continues to evolve right before our eyes, which is something that's underscored by the likes of Dell's Inspiron 14z Ultrabook.

The Inspiron 14z Ultrabook configuration Dell sent us to examine sports an AMD Radeon HD 7570M GPU with 1GB of onboard memory, an Ivy Bridge processor, 8GB of fast DDR3-1600 memory, and an optical drive, still somewhat of a rarity in this form factor...