X CD-ROM drive. The TransPort has excellent battery life and two pointing devices (touchpad and stick). It's heavy, however, weighing 7.2 pounds with battery and floppy drive.
Best Value
First place for Best Value notebook goes to the 166-MHz Gateway Solo 2300SE. It has the best price of all systems reviewed. The Gateway's strong performance score bested that of all the 166-MHz systems tested except for the higher-end Micron TransPort XKE and the Gateway 2000 Solo 9100XL. In addition, its usability is better than average.
The unit has a 12.1-inch screen that supports 800 by 600 resolution. Its PC Card connection supports Zoomed Video. And it can house up to 192 MB of memory in three SO-DIMM sockets.
Notable Portables
The Compaq Armada 7730MT's outstanding usability rating merits close attention. This model comes with an 8X CD-ROM drive, modular drive and battery bays, and a 33.6-Kbps modem. With a battery life of 3:03 (
in our tests
), it places in the top third of all systems reviewed. The Armada, a good desktop replacement, also scored excellent numbers in our Excel, Word, and Access applications-based tests.
Another portable worthy of notice is the Acer/Texas Instruments TravelMate 7060. (Acer recently acquired the TravelMate line from Texas Instruments.) It offers very good performance, coming in fourth among all other 166-MHz machines we benchmarked. What makes this system stand out is its long battery life. In our tests, it lasted 6:35, scoring significantly higher than its closest competitor, the Micron TransPort XKE , which lasted 4:72.
A Scattered Mix
Eight vendors sent us speedy machines in either 200-MHz Pentium MMX or 233-MHz Tillamook configurations. Those vendors who sent in 233-MHz machines were Sceptre, Micro International, Eurocom, Toshiba, and NEC. The 200-MHz systems were sent in by MicroExpress, Chem USA, and AMS. The performance results were a scattered mix, to say the least. Some
of these 200- and 233-MHz systems even scored lower than many of the 166-MHz systems tested. As a result, we did not pick a winner for this category.
The Sceptre Soundx 5500's performance score led the way; note, though, that it beat the top-performing 166-MHz by a mere 3 percent. However, new drivers will surely improve these higher-speed PCs in the months to come.
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Not all batteries are born to run. Many of the laptops in our tests averaged around 3 hours of juice, but there were exceptions. Tillamook processors, though expected to score well on battery life, actually scored significantly lower. How
ever, this is likely due to power-eating features like 4-MB graphics cards, 24X CD-ROM drives, and other hungry components.
Best Overall Power Portables
