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Laptops&Palm('99)

Eric Allen
CI366
PC Notebook and Palm Computers
10/5/99

We've come a long way from the first successful portable computer.   The Osborne, was introduced in 1981 and weighed 25 pounds, it came with 64 kilobits of memory. The Osborne's limited capacity and portability made it awkward compared to today's notebooks.   And the cost was close to $1800, that's not to affordable for the 1980's.

Through relentless pursuit of technology, notebooks of today are just a step-down from the desktop PC.   The notebooks of today are lightweight, weighing about 7 pounds and just as functional as your home computer.   These notebooks occupy the same software and operating systems as the desktop.   With the performance of today's notebooks nothing, time and speed will not be sacrificed.   Let's take a closer at what features and options they have to offer.

Processor
There are two main manufactures of processors used in notebooks today, Intel and Advanced Micro Devices Inc. (AMD).   The Intel processor is by far the most popular.   Most processors have 32 kilobytes of cache memory directly on the processors chip.   This type of memory is known as L1 cache. Without this L1 cache, when traveling outside the processor for information you has to slow down to the bus speed.   The bus speed in notebook computers is 33MHz or 66MHz, that's slowing you down compared to the speed of the processor ex. 350Mhz.   Through improvements AMDs product has become more popular, they are noted for offering lower priced notebooks.   Let's talk about clock speed, both Intel and AMD K6 use megahertz to measure clock speed.   Due to the differences in architecture, between the 2 chips, the K6-2 processor rarely performs at the level of the Pentium II processor with similar clock speeds.  
(Computer Shopper September 1999 and PC World July 99)

Memory
Another issue to take into consideration is how much RAM (Random Access Memory) a unit has.   RAM is an electronic storage area, where programs and data...