Prime real estate: This month's monitors chart ranks the 21-and 22-inch giants of the display realm.
For this month's reviews of systems and peripherals, click the links
below.
When it comes to monitors, bigger is usually better. Investing in a
bigger monitor can change the way you work, allowing you to use higher
resolutions and see more of your images or documents on screen at once. That's
why this month's monitors chart looks at 21- and 22-inchers. These giants of
the monitor world have a reputation for being heavy, expensive space hogs, but
as with most other computer products, their prices have been falling. Take, for
instance, Samsung's SyncMaster 1200NF, which debuts this month in first place
on our Top 10 Monitors chart. This behemoth, with its huge 19.9-inch viewable
screen area and diagonal .24-millimeter dot pitch, earned scores of Very Good
and Excellent, respectively, in our tests of text and graphics quality.
Although the SyncMaster's price of $824 is significantly higher than what you
would pay for a smaller monitor (many 17-inch models now cost between $200 and
$300), that extra screen area can make a big difference to those who want to
see a lot of data displayed at one time.
1 GHz: Top Speed, High Tariff
Last month, we looked at five of the first notebooks based on Intel's
new 1-GHz mobile Pentium III chip. Those systems scored new highs on our PC
WorldBench 2000 tests, although the improvement over the mean score for
PIII-850 notebooks was only 4 percent.
This month we reviewed the HP Omnibook 6000 for our Top 10 Notebook
PCs chart. The new 1-GHz Omnibook has many desirable features, including a
high-resolution 15-inch screen and a 30GB hard drive, and it's fast, earning a
score of 168 on our PC WorldBench 2000 performance tests. However, it failed to
place on the chart because at $4099, it's too expensive. Its impressive
features and high speed are not enough to compensate for its high cost.
The built-in aerials for 802.11b wireless networking represent yet
another intriguing trend in notebooks. A number of vendors now build aerials
into their notebooks, so adding wireless networking simply involves adding a
Mini PCI wireless network card. This solution also frees up a PC Card slot for
other uses. The first two notebooks with built-in aerials to appear on our Top
15 chart are the Dell Latitude C800 (number two on the power chart) and the
Latitude C600 (the number one Best Buy on the midrange chart).
Dell Tech-Support Issues?
A recent uptick in the number of complaints about Dell's customer
support is a surprise--the company has been a longtime fixture at the top of
our reader-based Reliability and Service surveys. Although the company's Good
support rating remains unchanged for the time being, we are keeping a close eye
on the mail to see if this is a short-term support problem (caused in part by
the launch of Windows Me) or a long-term change at Dell. We are also running
another Reliability and Service survey. Stay tuned.
Micron announced in March that it will sell its PC business,
MicronPC.com. Though the Micron brand will continue, we have no indication yet
as to how the changes might affect Micron customers. We will keep an eye on the
revamped company to see how capably it performs.
Freelance writers Jon L. Jacobi, Dan Littman, Kirk Steers, Joel
Strauch, and Carla Thornton, and PC World editors Richard Baguley, Tracey
Capen, Lisa Cekan, Rebecca Freed, Alexandra Krasne, Kalai Murugesan, Kalpana
Narayanamurthi, Melissa J. Perenson, and Alan Stafford contributed to this
month's Top 100 section. Curt Buehler, Ulrike Diehlmann, Matt Halloran, Robert
James, Elliot Kirschling, Jeff Kuta, Danny W. Lam, and Thomas Luong of the PC World Test Center performed
testing. |
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