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Small office / Home office
Panasonic squeezes a lot into lightweight notebook

By Rob Pegoraro
The Washington Post

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The usual remedy is to take out the CD-ROM drive, making it an ejectable module, an "expansion slice" that latches onto the bottom of the laptop or an external drive that plugs into an expansion port.

A laptop that weighs less than 3 pounds with a CD-ROM drive, let alone a combination unit that burns CDs and plays DVD movies, is much more unusual.

The Panasonic ToughBook CF-W2 is the first machine I've tried that accomplishes that trick — while delivering far better battery life than computers weighing twice as much. A few dubious details and a weak software bundle aside, this 2.8-pound, $2,200 machine is a remarkable piece of work.

The only problem is that the diminutive (about 10-1/2 x 8-1/4 inches and 1-1/4 inches thick) W2 is so hard to find.

Panasonic, which has traditionally focused on building rugged laptops for business and government markets, has yet to put this model into wider circulation since its debut late last year — only a few name-brand online retailers carry it.

Keyboards are usually the bane of small laptops. The W2 packs its keys in tight, but the letter keys are as wide as on a normal keyboard, and both shift keys are sized and spaced appropriately.

The touch pad in front is round, not square. The outer perimeter of its touch-sensitive area doubles as an iPod-esque scrolling control: Spin a fingertip clockwise or counterclockwise around that edge and you'll scroll up or down.

Ten-inch screens are standard for ultralight machines. But the W2 makes room for a bright, clear, 12.1-inch display.

The rest of the hardware: about 37 gigabytes of hard drive, an inadequate 256 megabytes of memory (some of which is lost to the graphics circuitry) and a 900 MHz Intel Pentium M processor.

An Intel Centrino Wi-Fi receiver, Ethernet port and modem can get the laptop online, and two USB 2. 0 connectors and a PC Card socket accept add-on peripherals.
 
In a worst-case-scenario test, with a DVD playing, the screen at maximum brightness and the WiFi receiver left on, this machine ran for almost 3-1/2 hours. It cycled through an MP3 playlist under the same conditions for just under 4 hours; with the screen at half its normal brightness (but still eminently readable), it lasted 4-1/2 hours.

I also did a best-case test, with Wi-Fi off, the LCD's brightness dimmed as low as possible and only a screen-saver running — and the W2 soldiered on for 8 hours.

However, the software bundle is thoroughly inept.

The installed copy of Windows XP Professional needed security patches from as far back as fall 2002. Intel's grotesquely complicated Wi-Fi software turned the simple task of connecting to a WiFi access point into a five-minute ordeal.

The CD-writing features built into Windows XP are disabled in favor of a clumsy, slow, third-party program.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company