Content area
Full Text
When you're away from your office or home, you want a powerful PC that will take care of your computing needs. Notebooks are getting more powerful because more notebook users are demanding substantially the same performance on a portable that they get at their desktop. You wouldn't want a desktop machine that can't run the applications you need for your practice, so why should you have to compromise when you're on the road?
Hardware vendors are providing strong solutions in compact packages these days. This time around, we'll look at the Epson ActionNote 660C notebook computer and two peripheral devices: the Panasonic KXL-D720, a PCMCIA CD-ROM drive; and Datasonix's Pereos, a tape backup system that holds up to a gigabyte of data.
Epson ActionNote 660C
The Epson ActionNote 660C provides lots of extras, combined with portability and power, that you can take when you travel between your firm and other offices. The approximately $1,800 system weighs in at 6.8 pounds and comes with a 66-MHz Cyrix 486DX2 processor with 8K of internal cache. You also get 4MB of memory, expandable to 20MB, along with a 340MB hard drive, 3.5-inch diskette drive, and a Type III PCMCIA slot that can fit two Type I or Type II cards. A 10.3-inch dual-scan color LCD screen provides 256-color VGA capability.
There's also lots of pre-loaded software on the 660C, including MS-DOS 6.22, Windows 3.1, Sidekick (which provides card file, calendar, and notepad utilities), ClarisWorks for Windows (integrating word processing, spreadsheet, database, communications, drawing, and painting features), and sign-up programs for America Online, CompuServe, Prodigy, and OAG (Online Airline Guide) FlightDisk.
Epson also provided us with an optional 14.4 kilobytes-per-second fax/modem card for the PCMCIA slot. It sells for about $169 to $179. The fax/modem card was easy to set up with the DOS-based install program, and it connected reliably. It comes bundled with DosFax Lite and WinFax Lite fax software and COMit FaxLite for DOS and Windows communications software. Besides the fax/modem card, Epson also sells flash memory, RAM, network cards, and hard disks in PC Card format. At boot-up time, the 660C presents you with a menu for deciding whether or not to load the PCMCIA drivers into memory.
One of the best features on the...