Meet Your New Best Friend: Your Notebook
Jul 14 '02
The Bottom Line This computer will probably be your best friend and the only one that speaks English in some occasions, so make sure you'll want to spend time with it.
Meet Your New Best Friend: Your Notebook
By Stephen Smith
These days, both travel and computing have become more and more a part of the business world, so it would make sense that people would find a way to combine them. Notebooks have become the business traveler’s new best friends. You can take them anywhere, use them anywhere, plug them it when you get to the hotel, and then go out and compute. In some cases, people fall in love with their notebooks and use them as a permanent desktop replacement, making the purchase even more important.
Choosing a notebook is probably more difficult than choosing a desktop because of all of the considerations and tradeoffs. Since your desktop can take up acres and acres of space and is always plugged in, you don’t have to decide between your ATI All-in-Wonder card or your gigabit network card, you can have them both. With a notebook computer you only have a limited amount of space, a limited amount of juice, and a limited amount of muscles to lug the thing into the heart of London or where ever you may be computing.
Although a notebook usually isn’t your primary computer and you won’t have to have it run the latest version of PhotoShop while downloading the latest plug-in, you will have to dome some computing. You will probably want/have to run business applications, surf the web, download via FTP, and maybe even watch a couple of DVDs on your way to Hong Kong. This means that you have to have enough power (via the processor), enough memory (via the RAM), enough bandwidth (via the network card or modem), and enough juice (via the battery). And since you won’t be able to upgrade as easily as on a desktop system, you’ll have to make sure it will last until your business will allocate you another machine.
As for the processor, Intel has recently released its Pentium 4 M (for mobile), and that’s the most powerful chip on the market. It’s fast, it has an okay power conservation factor, and it’s about all you will be able to find these days. Since the major notebook manufacturers, Dell, Gateway, and Compaq/HP, have stopped or scaled back on their implementation of AMD processors, that’s about all you will be able to find in the notebook.
In these days of gigahertz processors, most are fast enough that a couple hundred megahertz won’t really make a difference, so the RAM is the main factor in your computer’s performance. I would say that 256 megabytes of DDR RAM is sufficient. If you plan on doing a lot of business applications (other than just Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) or watching a lot of DVDs then I would say that you should opt for more than 256 megabytes; maybe 384 or 512.
When dealing with mobile computing, I think that the way you access the network/Internet is more important. If you’re at a desk, you probably can access the network via a 10/100-megabits/second-network card, however when you’re on the road it’s more difficult. Most business computers should come with a built-in network card and 56k modem, however if they don’t then I would seriously consider a different notebook. If you’re bent on that one, however, it would definitely be a good investment to use one of your PCMCIA (otherwise knows as simply a PC card) and buy a network card or modem. Another networking option is wireless. These cards are expensive, however, so unless you know that you’ll definitely need it, don’t buy one.
The last major consideration for a notebook is the power. This can vary widely from notebook to notebook. I would say that unless the notebook can handle at least 2 hours and 30 minutes on one battery, you’re better off with another. You should also buy another battery since you never want to be without juice when you really need it. Also, this isn’t really a consideration when buying a notebook, but a good way to reduce the power consumption is to use CD-ROM drives as little as possible (and don’t even stick one in the slot) because that spinning uses up a lot of power.
As for brands, I would go with the major three: Dell, Gateway, and Compaq/HP (I don’t know how they are going to work that out, whether they are going to drop one of the brands or just meld them into and HPaq computer). There is also WinBooks, a company that is only for notebooks, however I’ve never tried them so I couldn’t tell you about them. If anybody has any experience with them, good or bad, give it to me in the comment section and I’ll add it to the list.
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