Hi Again Kemble! Here is another article I just read. Looks like Dell is the solid choice! :)Leigh
"Instead of going with the innovator, however, I came down on the side of the solid performers. Dell's Latitude CPx and HP's OmniBook 4150 ran neck-and-neck through testing."
washingtonpost.com
GEAR
Notebooks to Tide You Over Until Next Generation Arrives
By Michael Cheek
Government Computer News
Thursday, March 2, 2000; Page E05
Desktop processors this year will hit a super-high note at the 1-gigahertz clock rate, but mobile-processor speeds won't lag far behind.
New technologies from chipmaker Intel Corp. will keep batteries running power-hungry notebooks a little longer. Add to the symphony a few ethereal notes from fast wireless links that rival wired Ethernet rates.
With 11 months still to go, I'd call 2000 the year of the portable computer, except that what is now available does not quite yet live up to that promise.
Our lab asked notebook makers to send general-purpose 500-MHz Pentium III portables weighing seven pounds or less. Not many vendors make dual-spindle designs at that weight. Heft eliminated several full-featured portables from consideration, but three makers hit the mark.
Compaq Computer Corp., Dell Computer Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. each sent a solid notebook with adequate features. Most notebook makers plan revised or all-new designs based on Intel's new 650-MHz Mobile Pentium III, so stay tuned.
In this roundup, the HP and Dell notebooks harked back to their predecessors without showing much innovation. Only Compaq had something new: the redesigned Armada line, launched late last year.
Instead of going with the innovator, however, I came down on the side of the solid performers. Dell's Latitude CPx and HP's OmniBook 4150 ran neck-and-neck through testing.
The Compaq Armada M700, which integrates a modem and weighs a pound less than the Dell and HP units, did not perform as well as they did. The too-small power button stuck occasionally, and the function and arrow keys were meager in size.
Compaq added a third button to allow scrolling, but its awkward placement often caused me to hit it when I meant to hit the often-used left button.
The third button was not programmable, as it should be, and it came nowhere close to the handiness of a wheel for scrolling.
The Armada's component benchmark performance fell into line with the other 500-MHz Pentium III notebooks. But in the real-life application scripts of Ziff-Davis Benchmark Operation's Winstone 99, the Compaq unit performed on average about 19 percent slower than the other two. Perhaps over-engineered drivers interfered.
I checked with Compaq's notebook lab tester and confirmed that Compaq itself got similar results.
Slower performance isn't a fatal flaw. I prefer solid reliability to breakneck speed, but the Armada sometimes simply paused, as if it were thinking about the key I had just pressed. The problem wasn't confined to one review unit. Compaq earlier had sent another Armada M700 that displayed similar hiccups.
The Armada's battery life was middle-of-the-road. On the lab's maximum-drain torture test, it survived about two hours. Taking into account the weight of the lithium-ion battery, the Compaq lasted about eight minutes per ounce of battery weight--not bad.
The Dell Latitude CPx survived a bit longer--two hours, 15 minutes, or about nine minutes per battery ounce. The HP OmniBook came in third, surviving about two hours; its slightly heavier battery delivered about 7 1/2 minutes per ounce.
Although the Dell performed better in battery life, the HP OmniBook squeaked out slightly better benchmark scores--except in hard-drive access, in which it blew the other two notebooks away. In all other categories, its scores compared to those of the Dell. So I checked the original-equipment makers of the Dell and HP units.
A nameplate isn't a true indicator of who manufactures something. In conjunction with Asian manufacturers that produce several brands, Dell, HP and Compaq design and have their notebooks made overseas except for final assembly and customization here.
I first thought the Dell and HP portables might have come from the same factory, but research indicated they didn't. Taiwanese companies Compal Electronics Inc. and Quanta Computer Inc. make the OmniBook and the Latitude, respectively. Nonetheless, their similarities were uncanny, from the speaker and power-button placements to the nearly identical weights.
Both notebooks had almost the same complement of ports, including a single USB (Universal Serial Bus) plug. The Dell had an S-video out port; in the same place, the HP had a small button to mute speakers.
Both notebooks came with two pointing devices: a touch pad and an eraser-tip pointer. Both had four buttons, two for the left mouse button and two for the right.
Neither the HP nor the Dell unit had an integrated modem. The Compaq Armada line is going to get an integrated network adapter, but all three test units lacked one. In future revisions, the makers should incorporate communications devices that won't take up one of the two PC Card slots.
Of course, wireless networking requires a PC Card slot, but the infrastructure for the recently approved 11-megabytes-per-second wireless standard needs building out, so current notebooks need a wire-based integrated fast ethernet adapter.
Compaq and HP both included a DVD-ROM drive for their modular bays. The Dell unit came standard with a CD-ROM drive, but DVD was an option.
All three had hot-swap bays, although the Dell and Compaq units supplied a cable to attach the third spindle--generally a floppy drive--without having to swap out. That's a nice feature for in-office use.
All three had good-quality, 14.1-inch XGA displays. Compaq's could have been brighter. All used similar 8-megabyte graphics adapters from ATI Technologies Inc. of Thornhill, Ontario.
Overall, the three 500-MHz notebooks make solid players, although the Armada's quirky hardware hurt its score.
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