Notebooks & Accessories

News: Acer's Budget Mobile Workstation

The Acer Aspire 1710 promises workstation performance at the right price: $1499. It includes an Intel 2.8-GHz Pentium 4 processor, a 17-inch wide-screen display, 512MB of memory, an 80GB hard drive, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive, built-in 802.11g wireless networking, and more. The mobile workstation weighs a whopping 15.7 pounds, however.

Review: A Heavyweight Contender From Gateway

At a hefty 10.4 pounds including power adapter, the Gateway M675XL (about $2800) is one big lug of a notebook. But it offers compensations for potentially breaking your back, says PC World reviewer Carla Thornton. For example, the striking 17-inch screen, which produced bright, sharp images at its native resolution of 1440 by 900 pixels, is ideal for displaying multiple documents at once. There are four USB ports--twice as many as we normally see. Battery life was disappointing, however, lasting just over 2 hours on one charge.

News: Dell Ups the Multimedia Ante

Dell's new Inspiron 9100 promises to deliver desktop performance in a multimedia notebook. At 8.9 pounds, the Inspiron 9100 is almost as heavy as the other notebooks featured in this week's newsletter--but it includes a 15.4-inch wide-screen display. A basic model costs $1549 and features a 2.8-GHz Prescott Pentium 4 processor, 256MB of DDR400 synchronous dynamic RAM, a 40GB hard drive, 64MB of graphics memory, and more.