ZDNet Australia reviews four of the most powerful notebooks on the market today.
Every single technology user is aspirational. We'd all like to have faster, brighter, better systems that don't crash, respond to our every command and have all the bells and whistles. Sometimes, though, the aspirational and real world paths converge, and we can justify expensive technology purchases. This was the essential rationale behind this feature; We wanted to test the best and brightest notebooks on the market today.
We went out to vendors and proclaimed "Send us your best. Your biggest, meatiest, most powerful, sexy, enthralling and innovative notebooks. Damn the minimum specifications. Damn the expense. Damn the torpedoes, even". You get the idea. The mix of notebooks we got back all have their own unique aspirational points.
A number of vendors declined to submit notebooks for review. Dell and Sony are in the process of relaunching their product lines, and thus didn't have suitable products at this time, while HP and Apple were unable to supply us with testing samples in time for our review.
Power notebooks are at a crucial juncture. Notebook sales are about the only positive thing in PC sales at the moment, and the essential split between a desktop replacement notebook and a mobile workstation has been the size and weight argument; most systems have had similar internal componentry. Intel's Centrino platform, due out mid-March, changes that equation, though.
Centrino's based around the processor that used to be called Banias, built from the ground up as a mobile processor. Banias is now called the Pentium-M, and Intel, for some reason, thinks users won't be confused by the naming similarity between the Pentium-M and Pentium 4-M. For the record, the Pentium-M is the new Banias chip and the 4-M is the older, desktop-processor-derived chip in current high-end notebooks today.
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Power trip: Four high-end notebooks tested Introduction 1. Acer Travelmate 426LC 2. Fujitsu Lifebook E7010 3. IBM Thinkpad T30 4. Toshiba Satellite 5200 Benchmark results Specifications |
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