Likely Laptop
Sydney Morning Herald
Tuesday March 31, 1998
Gateway 2000 solo 5100LS.
NOTEBOOKS sporting a lush 14.1-inch display have generally been each vendor's flagship, and with prices to match. But this boom at the top end has seen the price of these super-screens drop by as much as 30 per cent, bringing the cost of big screen portables into the corporate and fleet arenas.
The first of these is Gateway 2000's Solo 5100LS which, at $6,499, is an "affordable large screen" notebook. Its 14.1-in active matrix screen has a viewing area greater than that of a 15-in desktop monitor.
The Japanese-built 5100LS boasts an interesting and carefully considered mix of features and kick: enough to make it really useful, but not too much so the price is jacked up out of reach.
Under the bonnet there's a 233MHz Pentium MMX (Tillamook) processor with a sizable 64Mb of RAM and 512Kb of L2 cache memory. The choice of chip is a good one, as it offers a better performance-to-cost ratio than Intel's latest 266MHz CPU.
The 5100LS has a slim 30mm profile, and like most Gateway 2000 notebooks, it can deliver PAL or NTSC video output straight into a TV (or VCR) "video in" socket - handy for presentations when even the generous screen isn't big enough for your audience.
Sensibly, there are two USB ports, as most USB devices I have seen fail to offer a pass-through for connecting other peripherals in daisy chain fashion. If your notebook has only one USB port then you will probably only be able to connect one device, which is not at all the intention of USB.
Yet I remain to be convinced of the wisdom of USB in a portable environment unless any USB devices you connect come with their own power supply. Notebook batteries have precious little life in them as it is - without being asked to drive an external device.
On the Winstone 97 benchmarking suite, it returned a good score of 44, just short of the highest notebook score of 45.7. Under the new Winstone 98 benchmark - which tests performance with Office 97 and processing Web pages viewed through Netscape Navigator 3.01 - the score was 15.7.
The C&T 65555 chipset with its 2Mb of EDO video RAM (VRAM) scores as good as it gets, returning a Graphics Winmark of 86.7: not bad at all, when you consider it's driving 1024 x 768 pixels on that huge display.
The hard drive is a 3.1Gb removable IBM DPLA-25120 E-IDE module. When measured under Ziff-Davis's BatteryMark 2.0 with all power management disabled, the 5100LS ran for almost two hours on the 39 watt-hour lithium-ion battery. Bundled extras include Windows 95, Microsoft's Office 97 Small Business Edition, a TDK 33.6Kbps PC Card modem plus 50 free hours with Telstra BigPond.
THE BOTTOM LINE: The Solo 5100LS is an excellent corporate solution that factors performance and functionality against a very competitive price. The large screen makes it ideal for presentations. It outshines models from more illustrious brands and is one of the better "bang for buck" notebooks. Price: $6,499 From: Gateway 2000; 1800 500 338 Internet: www.gw2k.com.au
© 1998 Sydney Morning Herald
Share This