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David Berlind
Why you should buy notebooks, not desktops

David Berlind
Executive Editor, Tech Update
Monday, January 28, 2002
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In a recent column about the top seven priorities for business technologists, I urged you to stop buying desktop computers and to start buying notebooks. Several readers concurred. Others asked, "Why?"

Here's why.

BACK WHEN many users were moving from single to multi-tasking systems, the bottleneck to productivity was the system. The hardware couldn't keep up with the demands of the software, and many of us were caught in the middle, staring at an hourglass while we waited for our systems to catch up. Naturally, no one wanted hourglasses, so we sought out systems that broke the least amount of sweat when asked to do anything marginally complicated.

For telecommuters or road warriors, finding a notebook that delivered performance comparable to the faster desktops meant spending two to three times as much. Decent notebook systems were budget breakers.

Today, however, even the cheapest notebook computers outstrip the performance needs of the most demanding business users. (I'm not including the handful of CPU-intensive applications that most of your users don't run, anyway.) You no longer have to settle for a desktop because the notebook is too expensive.

CASE IN POINT: Me. By any standard, my 266MHz PII IBM ThinkPad with 128MB RAM is a dinosaur. The cheapest notebook computer you can buy will run circles around my system before my system even gets its laces tied. Yet, as demanding a business user as I am--it's not uncommon to see my system with 15 to 20 windows open--I'm never twiddling my fingers while my system sorts out what it's going to do next. In fact, about the only bottleneck these days is the Internet (which I find myself waiting for all too often).

Once you've eliminated performance and cost problems, you should start thinking about the advantages of notebooks over desktops. What some consider personal computers' biggest benefit--increased productivity--can be improved only by switching from a desktop to a notebook computer. The switch may require some retraining of your users to make sure they're getting the most out of their notebooks.

CONSIDER THIS: Very few users do all of their work at their desks. If computers make users more productive at their desks, why can't computers make them more productive when they're working away from their desks? For ten years now, I've personally eschewed desktop computers in favor of notebooks.

Meetings, for example, are an ideal situation for notebooks. Admittedly, when I ditched desktops for good a decade ago, taking my notebook computer to a meeting wasn't as simple as getting up and going to the meeting. Back then, notebooks didn't handle sudden events like disconnecting from the local area network very well. To bring my notebook computer to a meeting, I had to shut it down, disconnect all the wires, and restart it.

Today, however, I just close the lid on my computer (which temporarily suspends it), undock it from my docking station (a must-have in the business environment), go to my meeting, and re-open the lid.

UNFORTUNATELY, COMPANIES USING OUTLOOK and Exchange Server will find that Outlook is the weakest link in the chain of events just described. Inexcusably, Outlook can't handle very well the loss of its connection to an Exchange server. And users aware of this problem cannot easily switch Outlook between its online mode (where an Exchange server is always present) and offline mode (where no e-mail server needs to be present).

Switching between modes, even in Outlook 2002, still requires that you not only shut down Outlook (which may require closing several windows), but that you shut down any application with a connection to the Exchange Server via Microsoft's messaging API (MAPI). I have two such applications: ActiveSync, which keeps my system and my iPaq synchronized with each other, and Research in Motion's BlackBerry Desktop Manager, which does the same with the RIM Blackberry that I'm currently testing.

Are you all for notebooks? Or are you sticking with your desktop? Why? TalkBack to me.

Read the rest of David Berlind's column at ZDNet's Tech Update.

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