You won't find much on the keyboard deck of the Series 5 Ultra--just a small silver power button, a moderately roomy touchpad with two discrete buttons, and, of course, the full-size Chiclet-style keyboard. The keyboard is fairly comfortable to type on, though the matte-black keys are a little small and give slightly weaker-than-average feedback.

The touchpad is less impressive: It's smooth but not very sensitive, and the buttons feel cheap. In fact, on our test unit the left mouse button appears to sit lower than the right one, and feels as if it will break after a few months of normal usage. The touchpad supports multitouch gestures, such as pinch-to-zoom and two-finger scrolling, but the results are somewhat jumpy and inaccurate. For example, when you try to scroll with two fingers, Web pages jump up and down erratically instead of moving smoothly.

A thin, silver bezel surrounds the Series 5 Ultra's matte 14-inch screen. At the top of the bezel is a webcam, complete with a pinprick LED that indicates whether the webcam is turned on (in other words, exactly the way Apple's MacBook Air is set up). The screen looks pretty good. It has a native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels, which is a little low for a 14-inch display. By comparison, the has a native resolution of 1600 by 900 pixels, and a 13.3-inch screen. Likewise, Apple's 11-inch MacBook Air has a native resolution of 1366 by 768 pixels--but, of course, its screen is smaller.

The Series 5 Ultra's screen is extremely bright at its brightest setting (perfect for working in direct sunlight), and color representation is mostly accurate, though colors sometimes look washed out. The screen's temperature seems a little on the cool side, which means that whites occasionally take on a bluish tint. That effect is hardly noticeable, however, unless you turn the brightness up and look at a mostly white screen.

In PCWorld's benchmark tests, the Series 5 Ultra performed well for its category with a score of 95. This means that the Series 5 Ultra is only 5 percent slower at general computing tasks than our baseline reference PC, which has an Intel Core i5-2500K processor, 8GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, and an Nvidia GeForce GTX 560 Ti graphics card.