Rupert Goodwins' Diary

Wednesday 20/02/2002

"Don't put your Pentium on the move, Mrs OEM," says Intel, concerned that laptop manufacturers are putting desktop P4s into their wares instead of patiently waiting for the mobile part to appear. It gets too hot, uses too much power, needs too much air, notes the worried chip giant.

None of this cuts much ice with portable manufacturers, who are in no mood to hang about and not ship products that the users want. So they've gone ahead anyway.

In the blue corner: the memo from Intel warning about chip abuse. In the red corner: a Hi-Grade laptop with a 1.8 GHz old school P4. Our referee -- ZDNet UK Labs. A good clean fight, benchmarks out, round one. Ding ding.

After thirty rounds, the laptop is purring like a contented tomcat, and not much warmer at that. We've seen far worse behaved computers: the benchmark results are solid, the machinery shows no inclination to turn into a molten heap of slag, and the memo slinks away, discredited. Battery life? Not a problem.

So, Intel, we appreciate your concern. But we're still buying the laptops.