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NT scales down, gets mobile
InfoWorld tests a new crop of cutting-edge portables to find the best mobile computer for NT
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June 19, 1998 Web posted at: 3:45 ET by Holly Blumenthal and Joel Scambray |
From...
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(IDG) --Long-term skeptics might find it hard to swallow that you can run a resource hog like Windows NT on a portable priced reasonably enough to roll out to the masses -- but miracles happen. Just throw a Mobile Pentium II, 64MB of RAM, and a few add-ons such as power management and PC Card hot-swapping software into a package no thicker than two slices of toast and you're set to go. We looked at how five midrange notebooks ran under NT and found that they're up to the job.
Testing summaryThe questionYou need to standardize on Windows NT 4.0 for all mobile client platforms in your company, and you want to purchase new notebooks that are NT-compatible instead of upgrading existing units. Your budget allows for notebooks with midrange pricing. Which is the best notebook to meet your mobile NT needs? The issues
Dell's reasonable cost of ownership and ease of use made it the best mobile platform for Windows NT, although HP was a close second with snappy performance and long battery life. |
One OS for the enterprise
Why would anyone want to jump to what has long been considered the pariah of mobile operating systems? It comes down to standardization. The benefits of having a single, well-understood OS with strong vendor support running across all platforms are numerous, but they basically all boil down to ease of management and the time and cost savings inherent therein. Shops wanting to standardize on Windows are faced with a dilemma, however -- should they choose the more flexible Windows 95/98 or the more stable, secure, manageable, and powerful Windows NT?
With regard to mobile platforms, the answer has historically been Win95 due to NT's problems with "The Three P's": performance, power management, and plug and play. Mobile computers simply lacked the horsepower to efficiently run NT until very recently, unlike their desktop counterparts. Even if vendors offered adequate hardware resources, NT 4.0 lacks the power-management capabilities of sibling Win95 and would be practically unusable unless constantly plugged into a power source. Finally, NT currently has no plug-and-play capability, causing difficulties for hot-swappable devices such as PC Cards.
But now these problems are being resolved. The performance issue was solved with the release of Intel's Mobile Pentium II chip (Pentium Pro with MMX) in April. Additionally, several major laptop vendors and at least two software developers are addressing the performance and power-management problems with proprietary add-ons until Microsoft integrates a solution in NT 5.0. Suddenly, IT has a chance to truly standardize on a single OS, across even mobile platforms.
And as Microsoft makes it increasingly clear that NT will be the only Windows of the future, it makes more sense to begin the standardization early, buying the right notebook to take advantage of NT's power.
Putting on the pressure
We approached this Test Center Comparison as if we were supporting a large corporation that had decided to standardize on Windows NT across all enterprise PC platforms, including 500 mobile users. The mobile units were to be used by a sales force for typical desktop PC productivity applications (such as e-mail, word processing, and spreadsheets), not high-end multimedia or engineering work. With this situation in mind, we asked several leading laptop vendors to provide mobile Windows NT solutions.
The vendors were given few configuration restrictions on what they could submit for testing as long as it fell within a $2,000 to $4,000 price range, including docking hardware. We set this restriction to keep the focus on midrange products rather than expensive, high-end "luxury yachts" or low-end ultraportables. The $2,000 to $4,000 range was based on the results of a survey of InfoWorld readers taken in March. Respondents that are currently running or are planning to run NT 4.0 on laptops were asked what average price they would expect to pay for a notebook running NT 4.0. The bulk of responses (53 percent) fell in the $2,000 to $4,000 range. Only 23 percent expected to pay more, 20 percent "didn't know," and barely 4 percent expected to pay less.
Three vendors were able to supply us with notebooks that met our criteria -- Dell, Digital, and Toshiba. HP's and NEC's base price exceeded our cost restrictions, but they elected to participate anyway despite knowledge that they would be penalized in the cost scoring. IBM and Compaq didn't have midrange notebooks ready for testing, and Gateway declined to participate.
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We ran each notebook through the InfoWorld Application Suite, a series of tests designed to simulate real-world mobile use. Our benchmark is composed of the following applications: Adobe PageMaker, CorelDraw 6.0, Lotus Freelance 96, Lotus WordPro 96, Microsoft Excel 7.0, Microsoft PowerPoint 7.0, Microsoft Word 7.0, and Paradox 7.0. To measure how the notebooks' processing power stood up to handling NT, we ran performance benchmarks simulating typical office application use.
Battery life is also crucial to true mobility; we used our recently re-engineered real-world Battery Tester to determine how long each notebook's battery lasted. Not surprisingly, the battery life achieved by the notebooks in this Comparison was less than the vendors' claims. This should come as no surprise to anyone who has tried to use a notebook on a cross-country flight.
We also examined each notebook's usability, looking at factors such as weight, bulk, and screen quality.
Because manageability is becoming an increasing concern for clients across the enterprise, we evaluated the bundled management tools in terms of how much they could lessen the burden on IT support staff. We also checked out the plug-and-play support provided for PC Cards -- one of the major issues that has traditionally kept buyers away from NT on notebooks.
With the high price of notebooks continuing to be a thorn in the side of IT managers -- who might be sorely tempted to buy two desktops instead -- we paid particular attention to the ownership costs of the vendors' notebooks, including adequate support and docking solutions. We also evaluated the notebook vendors on the quality of their technical support during anonymous phone calls.
Overall, we found that although no notebook came out with stellar scores in all categories, almost all were more than adequate to handle NT. The major drawbacks we discovered had more to do with traditional notebook disadvantages than issues particular to NT -- short battery lives and high ownership costs drove down scores almost across the board. If you're willing to live with these disadvantages -- and most IT shops supporting mobile users already have to deal with them -- then there's no compelling reason not to pick the best of this bunch to run NT if you're interested in standardizing on a single OS.
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