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As a notebook veteran, I'm used to settling for an "also-ran" in the performance race. While desktop CPUs jumped from 333 MHz to 400 and 450 MHz, my top choice remained stuck on 266 MHz. So my ears perked up when I heard of Intel's pending mobile Pentium II-300. And I was positively gleeful when my favorite editor at PC World called and asked for my initial take on a half-dozen of these new powerhouses, a freshman crop including PII-300s from Compaq, Dell (two models), Gateway, Micron, and Transmonde.
Take It With a Grain Of Salt
I showed up at the PC World Test Center resolved to keep my perspective: I wasn't ready to take a hefty hit on battery life in trade for a modest speed boost. I needn't have worried. The average battery life on these new machines was comparable to that of 266-MHz Pentium IIs. And the speed jump was noticeable. Varying from a low of 154 to a high of 162, the average PC WorldBench 98 score is a good 10 percent faster than that of comparably equipped Pentium II-266s.
We tested the Compaq Armada 7400, Dell Inspiron 7000 D300GT, Dell Latitude Cpi D300XT, Gateway Solo 2500LS, Micron Millennia TransPort Trek II, and Transmonde Vivante SE 2300. All were configured with 512KB of secondary cache and 64MB of SDRAM--except the Latitude, which came with 64MB of EDO RAM instead. Each unit featured a...