If the concept of sitting at a desk for a whole day seems foreign to you, these road warrior notebooks are the combination of power and portability you're looking for.
In this latest roundup of notebooks we looked at some of the finest portable computing power for road warriors. They're all fast and light, feature large displays, and offer good battery life.
Sometimes you may find yourself with an ultralight notebook that lacks performance but is nice and light to cart around. On the other hand, you might find yourself using a desktop replacement notebook which may have all the power you need but is too heavy to constantly be taking it from place to place.
What we sometimes look for is a reasonably light notebook (2.5kg and under is what we classify as a good road warrior notebook) and that has the grunt of a fast desktop PC.
Most of the notebooks we tested for this feature would make good desktop replacement notebooks. Only die-hard power users would look elsewhere. These notebooks really look to offer an end user a good balance of speed, connectors, and weight.
Most of the notebooks featured 14in or smaller TFT displays. Once they get any bigger than this, the overall notebook becomes significantly larger and heavier. It's not so much the TFT making up the extra weight but rather the chassis of the notebook.
A 14in TFT is large enough that you could show a presentation to a small number of people. Then again, you could connect any notebook up to a monitor or projector if you were to have a larger audience present.
Most of the notebooks in this article feature all the basic connectors. The Apple and Toshiba notebooks didn't even feature any legacy connectors such as parallel or serial ports. This seems to be the way notebooks are currently heading, with more and more notebooks featuring additional USB ports. DVI didn't seem to be a very popular interface with these notebooks but almost all of them featured a 15-pin RGB out connector and/or an S-Video out connector.
Hard drive capacities varied from 20GB to 40GB which is ample for most users. Some of the notebooks we looked at had hard disks that spin at 5400RPM—up from the slow 4200RPM drives we have been used to for so long.
Graphics has usually been a dividing line between ultralight notebooks and high-end notebooks. As we mentioned previously, ultralight notebooks generally aren't speed demons. They lack in graphics, especially 3D graphics. That job is usually left to high-end notebooks. The notebooks we tested this time were an attempt to offer a solution somewhere in between.
Ultralight notebooks have their own market, specifically users who are concerned about weight or saving space. Someone who is after the latest and greatest, wants all the connectors on earth, and doesn't care about weight would go for a high-end desktop replacement notebook. In the middle are these road warriors, which can also pass as desktop replacement notebooks.
With that said these notebooks have their own place in the market—in fact they're the most popular type of notebook. It makes sense that there are many end users who want a large display and don't care too much about the weight of their notebook, but don't want to pay an arm and a leg. If these are your requirements, you would almost certainly go for one of the notebooks we tested here.
Networking
Bluetooth and 802.11b (Wi-Fi) wireless connectivity are mostly optional extras with these sorts of notebooks, but if you want the technology you can certainly have it. With Bluetooth you can link your notebook to devices such as mobile phones and PDAs. Wi-Fi technology on the other hand has also rapidly gained acceptance in many organisations as an alternative to a wired LAN.
However there are some security issues surrounding this protocol. All the notebooks also featured an integrated 56K modem and 10/100 Ethernet.
Battery Life
Intel's SpeedStep technology has been one of the reasons why we are seeing improved battery life.
On the other hand, faster processors, large screens, and an increased number of integrated devices has reduced battery life. Vendors have taken necessary steps to improve battery performance by using utilities that allow you to customise your notebook's power usage.
You can even set the CPU to work at slow speeds for certain tasks to save power. The LCD brightness can also be reduced to save power and turned off automatically if the notebook has been idle for even as little as a minute. The same sort of thing can be done with the hard drive.
Some of the notebooks we tested can house two batteries. IBM, for example, claims its notebook can provide eight hours of battery life when equipped with an optional second battery.
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