Toshiba, Dell Unveil Hefty Notebooks

Both Toshiba and Dell have released large notebooks that offer desktoplike performance, but Toshiba is targeting home users while Dell courts design engineers and high-end software developers.

Notebook Specs

The Toshiba A20/A25-S207 series notebooks come with Intel's 2.66-GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of memory, a 40GB hard drive, a 15-inch display, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, and integrated 802.11b connectivity. The A25-S207 costs $1499 with Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition, and the A20-S207 costs $1579 with Windows XP Professional Edition.

The A25-S207 notebook is priced at $1899. The unit comes with a 2.8-GHz Pentium 4 processor, 512MB of RAM, a 60GB hard drive, a 15-inch display, a DVD-R/RW drive, and integrated 802.11b and 802.11a wireless. It is bundled with Windows XP Home Edition.

Dell's new Precision M60 is a workstation-class machine that allows designers and developers to take their work with them. It is priced at $2599. A base configuration offers a 1.4-GHz Pentium M processor, 256MB of PC2100 (266-MHz) DDR SDRAM, a 40GB hard drive, a 15.4-inch widescreen display, and a 128MB Quadro FX Go700 graphics card from NVidia.

Mobile Pentiums

Intel recently released the Mobile Pentium 4 processor designed for this type of notebook, sometimes called desktop replacements. However, Toshiba is sticking with the desktop version of the Pentium 4 for its new notebooks.

Toshiba is currently involved in litigation over its older Satellite 5005 notebooks with desktop Pentium 4 processors that did not run at their advertised clock speeds due to overheating. Chips without power management technology are forced to throttle back their speeds when they reach a certain temperature.

The company will investigate the use of the Mobile Intel Pentium 4 for future desktop-replacement notebooks, a spokesperson says. Toshiba has released several large notebooks with desktop processors since the 5005 series without reports of any significant problems.