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Blurring the Line Between Laptops and Desktops

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the large-smallness dept.

bart_scriv writes "BusinessWeek looks at the latest offerings in ultra-portable PCs, offering up some specs and pictures. Some of the highlinghts: removeable 19-20 inch LCD dispays, dual NVIDIA cards and customizable exteriors. On the downside, some of these machines weigh almost 20 pounds and all of them sport a pretty high price tag — they probably won't be replacing desktops or laptops anytime soon."

3 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. weigh 20 punds? by ScottLindner · · Score: 4, Interesting

    That's not a portable! My laptop is heavy at 8lbs and it sucks to carry around with all of the gadgets and gizmos. Heck... even my SFF is lighter than 20 pounds. I love the concept but the weight has to improve big time.

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    Slashdot.. where people join together in deliberate ignorance.
    1. Re:weigh 20 punds? by stratjakt · · Score: 4, Interesting

      You're a wimp!

      I'd love to be able to carry, or cheaply ship a real computer to sites when I have to travel, or even set it up back at the hotel rooms so I can squash bugs, compile, and do database stuff on a *real* computer.

      It really sucks trying to do some sort of data manipulation involving millions of records, tens of gigabytes at a time, on a pentium M laptop with 512 megs of ram and one of its rinky-dink little hard drives. And many times the space is so tight on the clients server, I really have no choice during an upgrade to migrate the whole thing to the laptop (or usb drive) and watch the poor thing suffer overnight.

      I've been trying to talk the boss into letting me put together a high-specced shuttle cube PC that I could ship out with a 15' LCD for just such an occasion. Once I had them overnight my office desktop to me, because it was apparent that my laptop just couldnt cut it.

      So, like plenty of technologies, just because it's not useful to YOU doesn't mean it isnt useful to anyone.

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      I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
  2. if only it were blurred in a different direction.. by buddyglass · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Here is what I'd like to buy: a laptop, but without the keyboard, monitor, touchpad, speakers, and optical drive. Basically a little brick I could carry back and forth between work/home and drop into a docking station that's hooked up to a full-size keyboard, mouse and 21" LCD monitor. If you ditch all the human I/O devices (keyboard, touchpad, monitor, speakers) and commit to using an external optical drive, the thing shouldn't be much bigger/heavier than a portable hard drive.

    Alternately, I'd be happy with a "very fast" portable hard drive that has an elegant plugin interface to a desktop box. Then I could install everything on that drive and just lug it back and forth. The issue there is that I'd need to have "very similar" hardware in the two locations.