Feature Articles

The Notebooks of Yore - Portable Past Meets Future

By Aloysius Low - 26 Mar 2009

Timeline: 2001

2001


  • 2001 was also a year for our first Hardware Zone Awards, where we took five notebooks which we compared, contrasted and most importantly, benchmarked. The five finalists were: Acer's TravelMate 350, Sony's VAIO PCG-Z505GA, IBM's ThinkPad X20-31A, Fujitsu's LifeBook S-4546 and Toshiba Portege 7200CT. After a pretty intensive review process which also included benchmark scores, the Sony VAIO PCG-Z505GA was declared the winner, though the Fujitsu's LifeBook S-4546 came a close second, especially since it had a CR-RW drive that was pretty new and innovative back in those days.

Four of the finalists - from left, the Toshiba Portege 7200CT, Fujitsu LifeBook S-4546, Sony VAIO PCG-Z505GA and IBM ThinkPad X20-31A.

  • 2001 saw a review of the first Dell unit to grace our labs, the Dell Inspiron 4000, which was a colorful and pretty notebook with very decent specs. Featuring a Pentium III 800MHz processor and a ATI Rage Mobility-128 graphics card, the Inspiron 4000 also commanded a premium of S$4088 buckaroos, which was definitely jaw-dropping by today's standards. Given that the Inspiron 4000 was a solid workhorse for both productivity and multimedia performance, it should be a no-brainer that this was indeed worth the money spent.

While the retail version had colors, our review unit was plain and drab.

  • Apple's penchant for making the world's thinnest and lightest notebooks didn't just start with the Macbook Air. Back in 2001, they unveiled a 15.4-inch Titanium PowerBook G4 which featured a built-in DVD-Rom, measured just 1-inch (2.54cm) thick and weighed in at a comfortable 2.4kg. While it may have been pretty to look at, the cost of this 15 inch beauty which had a 500MHz PowerPC processor, 256MB SDRAM and a 20GB HDD would total in the regions of S$6388, which was sort of overkill, even for most Mac fans. The cheaper S$4688 version featured a 400MHz PowerPC processor, 128MB SDRAM and a 10GB HDD, which may seem laughable by today's standards.

It's by Apple. 'Nuff said.

The 1kg ultra-portable barrier was also broken during this time with Fujitsu's LifeBook P-1000, which used a Transmeta Crusoe TM5400 533MHz processor instead of the usual Intel platform. This indirectly led to the costs of the unit going down to sub $2500 levels at $2388, which was something amazing to say the least. Weighing in at 980g, the P-1000 traded connectivity and accessories for its lightweight size, which in the long run, would see this design influence hold true for the mini-notebooks of today.

The Fujitsu LifeBook P-1000 weighed in at just 980g! Light, and pretty!

  • Lastly, Dell's Inspiron 8000 series was the second time we awarded our coveted 5-star rating then, and it was a richly deserved. Powered by NVIDIA's GeForce Go chipsets, the systems were designed from the get-go for gaming and high end computing. Pitted against its competitors with similar specs, the Inspiron 8000 fared better thanks to the extra 16MB of DDR video memory and was also much cheaper than its competitors at S$5437 for the Pentium III 1GHz version. Of course, such staggering sums of cash are really 'normal' for that time period, and we're glad to be seeing notebooks come down in price as such sums would more than get you the best of the best notebooks these days.

The second recipient of our five star rating was this gaming rig, the Dell Inspiron 8000

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