Other pages in the review
Batteries
While in a hotel, at home or at another part of the office, it may well be convenient to use your computer while connected to mains power. However, for many people there will be a need to use the machine while on the road, outdoors or even on a plane [perhaps excluding a few troubled Dell laptops—Ed]. The effective life of batteries depends on capacity and power usage rates. Higher capacities depend mainly on physical size since the Lithium-type battery is pretty much universal. Some notebooks may have the option of larger batteries for travel purposes, but you should check whether these will interfere with docking. Power consumption rates depend on how the amount of processor activity (if the computer is working hard it will use power faster), screen size and brightness. Heavy use of drives and wireless will also reduce battery life.
Some machines will actively cut down energy resources available to the processor and other components when relying on battery power. The purpose of this is, of course, to prolong battery life. The down side is the sacrifice of performance. Clearly then, where high performance is required, it is best to make every effort to use mains power.
Windows Vista
The long awaited Windows Vista will be with us shortly. All of the vendors have indicated that their machines are capable of supporting the new operating system, but what does this mean and is it significant to you? Your first concern will be the minimum system requirements: for Vista Premium this includes a 1GHz processor, 1GB of RAM and 15GB of free
hard-disk space.
Vista comes in 32-bit and 64-bit flavours. The 64-bit version is expected to result in significant performance improvements due to the greater efficiency with which information can be passed around—of course this assumes the hardware is up to the task as well (as in the case of the AMD’s Turion 64 processors). This is all well and good for the future but don’t expect miracles immediately. We must wait for device manufacturers to produce new 64-bit drivers before we can truly take advantage of this technology. In the meantime buyers would be best sticking to the 32-bit versions. That said, it would be nice to know that one’s hardware is ready to take advantage of 64-bit technology when it arrives in full.
Systems which use 64-bit technology allow in excess of 4MB of RAM to be installed —permitting higher speeds when running memory-intensive applications and so higher precision operations can be achieved. Higher precision means advantages for high end scientific and design applications as well as advanced security. Of the machines reviewed this month, only the AMD Turion found in the Compaq nx6325 is a 64-bit CPU.
Six machines were supplied for this review. From Toshiba we have a Tecra M5. HP initially supplied a Compaq nc6400, but due to our desire to compare Intel and AMD processors we also have a Compaq nx6325. Lenovo sent an Thinkpad T60, Dell sent a Latitude D820 and finally Fujitsu supplied a LifeBook E8210.
Dell Latitude D820
The Latitude D820 is black and grey keeping the usual Dell colour scheme. The peripherals are all grey and silver. A lip around the screen bevel helps to keep the computer safe and clean when closed.
The speakers are mounted on either side of the keyboard and there is both a touchpad and a pointing stick. The machine also boasts a finger print scanner, 2.13GHz Centrino Duo processor, both Express and PCMCIA slots, smartcard reader and powered USB. Networking options include Gigabit Ethernet, wireless and Firewire. The 15.4in wide-format screen can manage a resolution of up to 1680 x 1050 pixels.
The Latitude is an attractive yet conservative-looking machine. It came to us with a wireless keyboard and mouse as well as an adjustable mounting for the dock, thus allowing the screen height to be adjusted. As a result the docked notebook simulated a standard desktop quite well. Having wireless peripherals is great in theory, but we found that the movement of the mouse on screen was not overly smooth due to the limited data rates via the
wireless connection.
The docking station adds S/PDIF, DVI and S-video connectivity to the D820 and docking the notebook is straightforward. There is little sideways motion required to locate the notebook properly and the dock can be used without the adjustable mount. Releasing the notebook should begin with selecting “undock” from the Windows Start menu and then a push button is used to release the notebook once the software indicates it is safe to do so. Docking and undocking while the machine is running (hot-docking) also presents no problems.
Performance with MobileMark performance testing software is not spectacular (it was the second lowest), though battery life is excellent (5 hours, 19 minutes). It thus displayes the worst and best scores respectively.
The Latitude sacrifices application performance for battery life when separated from AC power (hence the relatively low MobileMark performance score), which is certainly a sensible thing to do as the screen and video card are likely to chew up a fair amount of power. Sandra Pro memory tests show a 29 percent performance increase when mains power was available. Also, the Latitude achieved the highest Business Winstone result.
The Latitude D820 is a very impressive machine; we particularly liked the high resolution monitor and good port selection. Perhaps the only thing missing is Firewire and SD/MMC slot—the latter being easily fixed with a USB adapter. Some people may wonder about the lack of preinstalled software but as a personal preference I would, for the most part, prefer to populate my own computer with applications.
The price, at $3235, is a little outside the range we were looking for, but only by eight percent. Dell is promoting a green image by offering free PC recycling and has an excellent three-year warranty program with next-day onsite service.