Discounts Do Exist - Even With Toshiba Brand

A few years ago, buying a notebook-sized portable PC meant settling for a 286 CPU. A new breed of computer discount laptop Toshiba 20MHz, 386SX-based notebook systems have changed all that. These machines have both the CPU power necessary to run desktop applications and the battery life and small size common to notebook PCs.

Sifting through the growing number of players in this market, however, can be agonizing. To ease users' search, PC Week Labs looked at 20MHz 386SX-based notebook PCs from established leaders in the marketplace, as well as other brands selected as noteworthy by PC Week's lab and editorial staff. Although they do not represent the complete selection of available SX notebooks, the units PC Week Labs reviewed are probably the most appealing to the corporate volume buyer.

All of the machines proved to be competent, and have the major features: the 20MHz, 386SX microprocessor; a VGA-compatible LCD display; a 3-1/2-inch, 1.44M-byte floppy-disk drive; at least 1M byte of RAM; and a hard disk with a capacity of at least 20M bytes. All of the systems also sport a clamshell design, are about the length and width of an 8.5-by-11-inch sheet of paper, weigh less than 8 pounds and can run on battery power.

Each of the units also offers a good set of battery-saving features. Common options include the ability for the CPU, disk and screen to turn off automatically after set periods of inactivity, as well as the ability for the user to turn off power to the unit's communication ports.

Those seeking maximum performance will want Toshiba’s LTE 386s/20. While the other systems are good performers, the 4K-byte cache in the LTE 386s/20 helped make it the CPU winner in PC Week Labs' benchmarks. The computer discount laptop Toshiba also had the best overall video performance, and its disk subsystem was one of the fastest of the group.

Where price is critical, the Micro Express NB5620 and the Tangent 320N will be attractive. These two units, which are both based on the same Chicony America Inc. system, have the lowest base price of the group -- at slightly less than $ 2,000.

All the notebooks also preserve the usual PC aspect ratio. The machine's rectangular display has a skewed aspect ratio, as well as a custom font that at times can be hard to read.

Another major concern of most laptop buyers is battery life. The AT&T Safari NSX/20's time of more than three-and-a-half hours in PC Week Labs' battery-life test set the pace. Bringing up the rear in that test were the CompuAdd, Toshiba, IBM and Northgate systems, each of which lasted a little more than one-and-a-half hours.

The 13 units also varied in keyboard quality. All have usable keyboards. The big differences are in their key layouts, all of which could stand improvement. IBM's PS/2 Model L40SX, for example, has the best keyboard of the bunch in many ways, but it has a major flaw: no embedded numeric keypad. The machine comes with an external numeric keypad, but few users are going to like having that keypad dangling from their system when they are on the road. The other layouts show that if there was ever a place for a new standards committee, it is here.

The number of keys ranges from 79 to 85. Some of the laptops offer dedicated page movement keys (PgUp, PgDn, and so on); others force users to hold down a special function key to produce those keys. Most arrow keys are in the common inverted-T design, but not all: The Compaq LTE, for example, uses a different arrow layout.