Five Notebook Pet Peeves

Notebook computers have certainly become mainstream computer products. Over the last year, notebooks even surpassed desktop sales numbers. In other words, notebooks have had more than enough time to mature.

However, I’m increasingly annoyed by a few areas that notebooks are simply less than ideal are far as computers go. As we approach the "back to school" season when notebooks will be sold by the ton, here’s a list of some issues.

1- Hard Drive Speed
When was it ever dictated that all notebooks had to have a 4200 RPM hard drive? Not only is the hard drive at the slowest speed, but they have small amounts of cache as well, in most cases 8 MB. While there are plenty of aftermarket 2.5” hard drives with more cache, and faster 5400 and 7200 speeds, few are used by the manufacturers. While they keep speeding up the processor of the notebook, the bottle neck is the hard drive for now. It’s true that the slower hard drive speeds help conserve power, but it’s not helping all that much anyway.

2- Battery Life
Remember when we were all promised a 5 hour run time with the Centrino package? Well, I’m still waiting for it. Most notebooks can’t get above a three hour run time between charges, and some can barely go two hours. And that’s with a new battery fully charged- it only goes downhill as the notebook and battery ages. While I’m not saying that Intel’s SpeedStep (and competitor AMD’s PowerNow) “clock speed on demand” are bad things, but getting through even a half day untethered from the wall outlet simply isn’t happening with today’s notebooks.

3- Optical Drive Speeds
Optical drives for notebooks somewhere got stuck around the halfway mark of their desktop brethren. That means 8x for DVD duties, and 24x for CD duties. Why can’t they go any faster? I’ll also briefly mention that optical drive firmwares for notebooks are either infrequently updated, or not at all. I’m not sure why we tolerate this. I’ve resorted to using an external desktop optical drive with the notebook at home, but this is hardly a portable solution.

4- Port Arrangements
I think this pet peeve of mine is well known by now, but I’ll keep bringing it up anyway. Many notebooks put their USB ports so close together that even if you have the good fortune to have more than two, you can’t use them simultaneously. Many USB devices are a little larger than the port, and crowd the neighboring ports. The solution is to space them out, or even better, to put the USB ports not all next to each other, and some on each side. I’m not holding my breath for this to happen anytime soon. Would a portable USB hub help? Of course that is the solution, but I carry enough junk already.

5- Connectivity & Updates
Granted, notebooks have come a long way in this area. My notebook can hook into the internet via WiFi, wired Ethernet, and 56k modem. It can establish each of these connections reliably and maintain them. There are some weeks, where my notebook uses all of these methods to be online. So what’s the problem? Maybe it’s just Murphy’s Law, but it seems that whenever I’m on dial up is when it decides that it’s time to update...everything. The antivirus scanner decides it needs critical signature updates. The spyware scanner is asking to go online for an update. Windows XP also decides that it’s time for more of Microsoft’s Critical Updates. Not to mention Zinio Digital Magazine Delivery downloads. There should be a way to setup the notebook so that all updates are done when on broadband, and not on narrowband dialup. Let's just say that i'm not holding my breath for this feature in Windows Vista.

While I’m not ready to leave my notebook at home, these are five areas that notebooks can really benefit from some improvement. Keep this in mind if you're deciding between purchasing a notebook or a desktop.

--Jonas