No CEO is complete without his PC in the networked society. But nothing changes as fast as information technology itself. This fortnight's menu: new thoughts on the notebook. And a program that organises your database. 

By Vivek Bhatia

There was a time when a notebook computer brought with it a smorgasbord of ergonomic and computing disasters. Cramped keyboards, eye-watering displays, and tiny hard disks, as well as slug-like performance, was the norm. Gone are those days, with the last two years seeing some very useable notebooks. A handful of contemporary notebooks have now reached the no-compromise feature and performance levels that, in some cases, take them well beyond what the average desktop is capable of. Why, even my boss agrees !

For some time now, ibm Thinkpads have been at the top of the notebook heap. Always a company whose engineering strengths were deeper than its budget-product capabilities, IBM has discovered, in the Thinkpads, a niche in the personal computing market where customers are willing to pay a premium for higher performance and better-engineered machines.

For a year now, the most hi-tech notebook in the world has been the top-of-the-line Thinkpad, and I find the 765d no exception. The most amazing thing about this machine is its display: corner to corner, it measures an incredible 13.3 inches. This is larger than most notebooks I have worked with; the 14-inch monitor of my Compaq Deskpro weighs in at 12.9 inches. Most 14-inch monitors are called that way because the picture tube size is 14 inches while the actual viewing areas are always in the range of 12.5 to 13.5 inches.

As you start using the Thinkpad, its real advantage comes to the fore: performance. On a zdBench test comparison I did, I found the 765d 11 per cent faster than a desktop machine from a major pc manufacturer which also had the same CPU--a Pentium 166 with MMX--as well as the same 32 MB of RAM. And notebooks are supposed to be slower than desktops with the same specs.

Tasks that most desktop PCs fail miserably at, such as playing full-screen video off a video-CD, this machine does without a strain. What is the secret of this blazing performance? It is a design philosophy that could be called one processor per task. Inside the 765d, there are specialised processors dedicated to each kind of task. For instance, the display is handled by a graphics co-processor that has 2 MB of its own memory. While this is not uncommon on desktops, video playback is handled by a so-called hardware MPEG system. [Motion Picture Experts Group is the standard which specifies how video is coded for computing and video-CD applications.] Decoding MPEG is a very computer-intensive task. While the normal way of putting MPEG in a PC is to install a MPEG-decoding software that runs on the machine's main CPU, the Thinkpad way is to have a dedicated co-processor that is designed for this single task.

And the approach to designing the 765d's built-in modem is just as unique: the modem in the 765d is actually a piece of software, which executes another special co-processor called a DSP (Digital Signal Processor). The advantage is that, as newer standards are developed, the modem can be upgraded by just installing new software. The audio functions, which drive the two 20-watt speakers, are also built around a DSP. For all its muscle, the 765d is not an unwieldy machine: its keyboard rises to an ergonomic angle, and it weighs less (3.40 kg) than similar notebooks from most of the other manufacturers. This cool machine is real hot.