Editors' Choice
To pick a clear winner was very difficult. The Compaq is fast and was the lightest notebook we had tested. However the Mitac notebook, which seems to be a close relative to the Compaq, just snuck up behind the Compaq to win this month's Editors' Choice Award. The Mitac is priced $200 less than the Compaq and it also has a 12GB hard disk compared to the Compaq's 10GB drive.
The Mitac houses a few extra niceties like additional USB ports. The Mitac is not much heavier than the Compaq and what put the icing on the cake for the Mitac notebook was its styling. The Mitac looked a lot more modern and stylish than the Compaq and most of the other notebooks.
HOW WE TESTED
WinBench 99 V1.1
All notebooks were tested with 128MB of memory.
Content Creation Winstone 2001
Content Creation Winstone 2001 is a system-level, application-based benchmark that measures a PC's overall performance when running top, Windows-based, 32-bit, content creation applications on Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, or Windows 2000. Content Creation Winstone 2001 uses the following applications: Adobe Photoshop 5.0, Adobe Premiere 5.1, Macromedia Director 7.0, Macromedia Dreamweaver 2.0, Netscape Navigator 4.6, and Sonic Foundry Sound Forge 4.5.
Business Winstone 2001 V1.0
Business Winstone tests with the most popular office suites in the marketplace rather than individual applications: Corel WordPerfect Suite 8, Lotus SmartSuite, and Microsoft Office 97. Following the lead of real users, the tests keep multiple applications open within each suite, and switch tasks between those applications and Netscape Navigator. The new High-End Winstone 2001 focuses on hot spots where demanding users tend to have to wait on their PCs.
Winstone 2001 is a system-level, application-based benchmark that measures a PC's overall performance when running today's top-selling Windows-based 32-bit applications on Windows 95, Windows 98, or Windows NT (High-End Winstone runs only on NT). Winstone runs real 32-bit business suites and high-end, demanding applications through a series of scripted activities and uses the time a PC takes to complete those activities to produce its performance scores.
Winstone's tests don't mimic what these programs do; they run actual application code. The CD-ROM that contains Winstone also contains all the files and application portions the benchmark needs to run.
8%
1%
