This question from reader "liebgard" showed up in the PCMag.com forums for lead laptop analyst Cisco Cheng, in regards to his roundup, "These Ultraportables Have Drive." (Context: Prior posts in the thread mentioned the absence of the Toshiba Portégé R500--pictured--which was not included in the roundup.)
Question: Please compare the Toshiba Portégé R500 with the 3 listed [in the roundup]: the Sony VAIO TX150N, the Panasonic Toughbook W5, and the Fujitsu Lifebook P7230. You recommended [the Toshiba R500] just before it came on the market, but since then I saw some not-so-great performance reviews. That's why I went to the article about the ultraportables: to see if there is something better. They all seem lacking in performance.
Cisco's answer, after the jump.
Cisco replies: The Toshiba R500 suffers from the same performance setbacks. Anytime you get a laptop under 3 pounds, the likelihood of it using an ultra-low-voltage processor is pretty much a slam dunk. In fact, there aren't any laptops in the market right now that run a standard voltage processor on a sub-3-pound frame.
So how does this affect performance? Not much, if you're running Office, surfing the Web, and editing the occasional photo. If you're running Vista, you should add 2GB of RAM to offset the weakness of the slower processor. You should be OK with 1GB running Windows XP.
The beauty of the Sony VAIO TX150N, the Panasonic Toughbook W5, the Toshiba Portégé R500, and the Fujitsu Lifebook P7230 is that each has a built-in optical drive and weighs less than 3 pounds.
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December 5, 2007 12:37 PM
If you are looking for the ultra-performance needed by some of the higher-end applications out there, a NextBook17E may be the solution. Although it does not have the "lighter than air effect" to make it under 3 lbs, it does allow for multiple configurations, chipsets, and power sources making it a laptop (or the company calls it a Desktop Replacement) with the computing power of a stationary network server. The company also makes multiple "flextops", which offer even more computing power in a package about the size of a briefcase. They also offer SPARC's
The NextBook17E can be found here: http://www.nextcomputing.com/products/nextbook.shtml
The entire product line can be found here: http://www.nextcomputing.com/products/prodmain.shtml