More Notebooks

Tuesday, February 03, 2004

Apple Powerbook G4
One look at any Apple machine makes you feel like owning one, and the Powerbook is no different. First, the 17" screen is overwhelming. Add to it the well-placed keyboard that allows ample support for the wrists. Then there’s the ATI Radeon 9600 with a dedicated 64 MB DDR, a massive 80 GB HDD and 512 MB RAM, expandable to 1GB. All this can be extended with the help of two USB ports, Airport extreme, Gigabit LAN, FireWire 400 and FireWire 800 ports. Surprisingly, all this is housed in just a 1.1 inch thick slick looking aluminum chassis. 

If you are nocturnal, you will fall in love with this notebook. One of the most interesting features it offers is the ambient light sensor. As soon as you take the notebook into low light conditions, the light in the keyboard lights up and the screen brightness goes down. 

Priced at about Rs 200,000 it is the Mercedes among notebooks.

Pushpam Civilnote 410
Lowest price is the only high point of this machine. It's powered by a PII 266 MHz processor and comes with 128 MB RAM and Win 98, which is an outdated configuration. This one is positioned as an ultra-low-cost option for specific users such as LIC agents and bill collectors. But another Rs 8K on the asking price and you can get a P4.

Apple iBook G4
The cheapest of all Apple notebooks, the iBook G4 is priced at about Rs 77K, has a 12" display and runs the latest Panther Mac OS X. Though compact, it's not that lightweight, weighing about 2.2 kgs. Powered by a 800 MHz Power PC G4 processor, 256 MB DDR RAM and a Radeon 9200 graphics card with a dedicated 32MB DDR SDRAM, it has a 30 GB HDD and a DVD combo drive. Connectivity options are a limited with two USB ports, FireWire port an Airport extreme, and an inbuilt microphone.

Dell Inspiron M600
From the thin and light series of Dell notebooks, this one has a very high end configuration and costs about Rs 97K. It has a a P M 1.7 Ghz processor, 512 MB RAM, a ATI Radeon 9000 with 64 MB DDR RAM and a DVD writer. These features showed the results in both BW 2002 and MCCW 2003, scoring 29.2 and 39.2, respectively. This is the highest score in amongst all. On the features front, it misses out on a FireWire connect and a scroll on the touchpad. It comes with a set of diagnostic tools to help you check each and every part of the notebook for any possible problems based upon the symptoms experienced by you.

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