Dual Cores are Here

It was a dark and stormy day, in Mumbai, with rain pouring down and creating

floods. Well, not when we started testing, but when we started sending out

invites to different notebook vendors to send us their entries for this year's

round of the notebook shootout. Perhaps that (the dark and stormy day) was why

we initially had only a few entries. But as time flew by and our 'go to press'

date neared, we were literally flooded with so many notebooks! This time we see

a larger number of brands and models compared to our last three shootouts. 

We have 12 brands and 27 models, ranging from Celeron and Sempron to dual

core and 64-bit notebooks. This time, we did not prescribe any technical

specifications or price range (as we did in the last shootouts), except to say

that we were looking for 'enterprise executive' models. The prices of these

models also varied widely from around 28K to 1.3 Lakhs, clearly indicating that

these models were aimed at different strata of the corporate ladder.

Cool Feature...

A full numeric pad on the keyboard is nice, but rare to find

Fingerprint readers add biometric protection for your notebook

Memory card readers are common across price bands

Super-high configs like this one may not be readily available in the market

Now we had several options in front of us on how we wanted to compare them

against one another. One, we could compare CPU types (32 bits with 32 bits and

so on), or divide them into price bands or look at their features and classify

the notebooks on the basis of that. Finally, we reasoned that if someone could

buy a 64-bit notebook at a very low price, then that would be a plus. Therefore,

we classified the notebooks into the following four categories:



1. Budget: Less than 50K


2. Mid-Range: Rs. 60 to 90K


3. Feature rich: 1 to 1.2 Lakhs


4. Ultraportables

In each category, we have atleast one winner for you (the Editor's Choice

in that category) and an alternate (Cyber Media Labs Highly Recommended) if we

have enough in that category to select one. The specifications and ratings of

notebooks are presented in a table for quick reference and comparison at the end

of each category.

Before we go on to look at what and how each notebook did, let's take a

look at some of our findings from the past shootouts and this one and see what's

changed and try to get a feel of the trends in the notebook space. This is

important to deciding what to buy.

What's changed in a year?



It was a year and a month ago that we had our last notebook shootout and in the
mean time, the technology landscape has changed quite a bit. 64-bits and dual

core had just come in during our last battery of tests, and both are a standard

now. Notebooks now also come with a standard of 256 MB RAM, some of them come

with 512 MB and a select few with even 1 or 2 GB. But, the one area of the spec

sheet that seems to be as open as the Portugal and Spain world cup match is

where hard disks are concerned. The entries we got had hard disks that went from

a mere 30 GB to a spacious 120 GB.

Wide and glossy screens are here too. 15” screens of both the standard and

wide varieties are common across the brands. And how's this for playing copy

cat-features like one button recovery from hidden partitions, the presence of

both a track-point and a track-pad, a bunch of applications that control all

your notebook's features from security to wireless to BIOS settings to

software updates are no longer the exclusive preserve of the likes of IBM/Lenovo.

That's gone cross-brand too, with each brand trying to out do the competition

with the kinds of tools available and how useful that tool is to the user. This

includes security and recovery tools and things that help configure your

notebook.

Features to consider



This time, instead of counting every button and port on the device and scoring
them, we decided to categorize these elements into five sets: usability,

connectivity, reliability, security and portability/aesthetics. Under usability,

we looked at features that made your life as a notebook user easy like the

layout of keys, optical drives and ports, the kinds of additional switches and

soft-buttons the notebook had, the screen size and the location of speakers. We

counted the number of ports whether USB, docking/replicator, Bluetooth and

SD/Memory card along with the type of wireless connectivity as connectivity.

Reliability would be the type of drive protection (motion sensors and so on),

locks for your screen with the notebook folds down, type of recovery featured

(automated or manual) and the body make up (special alloys, roll cages) that the

notebook featured. If the notebook had a fingerprint reader, a TPM chip or a

SmartCard slot, we added that under security. Smart cards would enable you to

remotely and securely login to your corporate networks and authenticate over VPN.

The form factor, weight, if it had a carry bag, how slim it was and scratch

resistant body were counted under portability and aesthetics. Our traditional

Brown-Gibson model for features then rated the value of each of these categories

according to the category they were in.

We note that 'drive protection' using motion sensors is offered only from

the 80K upward price bands, with the exception of the Acer TravelMate 3242 that

offers it at its MRP of Rs. 49,999. Fingerprint readers and TPM are also the

preserve of those who can afford an 80K plus notebook.

Performance



To test the notebooks for performance, we opted to go in for our trusted set of
benchmarks. To test productivity and computing power of each notebook, we used

Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2003 (MCCW 2003). To test their graphics

and gaming, we used 3D Mark 2003. Finally to check how long the battery would

give you without an AC power source, we ran the BatteryMark 2002 (BM 2002)

benchmark.



In the interest of checking for the notebook's performance at normal settings,
we did not perform any optimizations on the notebook other than exactly what was

required to run the various benchmarks.

Although we did not count the CPU type in our tables, it was interesting to

see 4 of the 16 dual cores in this shootout available in the 45 to 70K price

band (first and second price categories). All the 64 bits in this shootout are

also in the sub 70K price range.

Price



Traditionally in our shootouts, price has been elemental in deciding the 'value
for money' factor of the equipment in question. Since we had already divided

all the notebooks into 4 different price bands, the MRP of a notebook would

decide the value of that notebook vis-a-vis the other books in that category. In

each category, we have first pro-rated the price based on the lowest priced

notebook in that category before we took it into account in our final results

sheets.

Exceptions to the rule



For some of the notebooks, we had to create exceptions to the rule and look at
them a bit differently. For instance, we received two models (the HP NW9420 and

the ASUS F3JM) that should have been classified 'Feature Rich' by price

band. But they were so feature rich that we placed them in a category of their

own.We have mentioned inside this where relevant.

We now take you through each category, examining the winners in detail, while

the rest of them are presented in a tabular format for your convenience.