Introduction
With 'teleworking' and similar concepts fast becoming a way of life for an increasing number of people, laptops have carved out a market all to themselves. Where initially they were regarded as a compliment to the desktop in the office, laptops have now taken over for a lot of people as desktop replacements. It is increasingly common to find processors in laptops that are equally as powerful if not more so than those found in a lot of desktop machines. With new mobile processors coming out at almost the same pace as their desktop equivalent, Intel and AMD are really hotting up the market place. Lower voltages in the new processors mean longer battery life for the notebook, which can mean the difference between finishing a document of a train journey and pitifully staring at a black screen for the last half hour...

For this test we set a price limit of £999.00 plus VAT which, whilst isn't going to give you a machine with all the latest bells and whistles on, should meet the requirements of all us budget-minded people. In fact out of the five notebooks we received, only two of them could meet our criteria. Sorry, but when we say £999, we mean £999...

The two companies that did meet our criteria were Hewlett Packard and Umax, both well know, established companies who set themselves and the competition high standards to follow. Whether those high standards can extend to a sub-£1000 notebook remains to be seen...

How we carried out our tests
The suite of benchmarks we used enables comprehensive system performance measurement with the most popular applications covering a wide range of Office Productivity applications running under Windows 98 operating system. To achieve this we ran BAPco SYSmark 2000.

I had a weekend away and decided to take both the Omnibook and the Actionbook on the road and see how they performed. Most people are interested in battery life so I let the batteries fully charge overnight and didn't use the mains while I compiled several graphic based reports.

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