I just got a laptop from my employer, and while the laptop is only moderately heavy, (6.1 lbs) the bag they gave me with it is a serious clunker. Even empty, this bag is 10 lbs or more, and it’s a shoulder bag, so the weight drags me down unevenly. A colleague with the same laptop has an LLBean backpack that she loves, but we couldn’t find it on LLBean’s website, so I went searching on Amazon and found this Belkin slim backpack:

It had relatively good reviews, so for $30 it was worth trying. I posted the following review on Amazon, and because I don’t generate that much blog content I figured I’d repost for y’all here. Enjoy!

I’ve had this backpack for about two weeks now, and I’m absolutely loving it. Good protection for my HP/Compaq laptop, and much lighter than the leather briefcase that my company issued with the laptop. There is room for a full-sized engineering notebook and a few folders, and there are a plethora of internal pockets sized for business/credit cards, nicely stiff pockets for pens (so the pens won’t fall over and leak on your laptop), and a zipper pocket near the top so you can find your keys.

There isn’t a lot of depth—they really mean it when they say “slim”—and there isn’t any good place to stick a water bottle unless you don’t have the laptop in the bag. Without the laptop, the bag just barely accommodates my 40oz water bottle.

The front pockets are nice, but also slim. The horizontal one has just enough room for an ID badge, business cards, a passport or a thin wallet. It has a thin cloth divider for keeping cards straight, which could be useful. I think the vertical pocket would accommodate a paperback novel (at least, a thin one) but it would be too shallow for a thick paperback and too short for a hardcover book. You can put one or two hardcover books in the main compartment, as long as you don’t have much else. If you pack very lightly, you could probably put an extra day’s clothes and a laptop in this bag, but it would be a tight fit and the zippers might be straining.