Eric Grevstad

Toshiba‘s Portege brand helped pioneer the executive status symbol known as the slim-line notebook — a thin, stylish laptop that trims weight by packing only an internal hard disk with no floppy or optical drive apart from a desktop docking station or plug-in external accessories. The 12.1-inch-screened, under-three-pound Portege R100/R200 continues that tradition today. But […]

How can you tell when a technology or product category has really hit the mainstream or evolved from the geek elite to a mass-market consumer item? You’ve seen it happen with external hard drives, inkjet printers, and monochrome laser printers, and it’s always the same: First the products get affordable. Then they get small. Then […]

When it comes to laser printers, we’ve had to huff, puff and brace ourselves before lifting a 60- or 70-pound color laser printer out of its box. But when we tried that with the Konica Minolta Magicolor 2430DL, we darn near yanked the thing up and smacked ourselves in the face with it: The 2430DL […]

If you close your eyes and lift the Gateway M680XL, you’ll think it’s an average, full-sized notebook — the PC weighs 8.4 pounds, not the 9.5 or 10 of many jumbo-screened desktop replacements. Open your eyes, however, and you’ll say it’s enormously huge, colossally gargantuan, what industrial designers call really freakin’ big: 10.9 by 16.1 […]

When your pockets get full of loose change, do you dump your pennies into a jar or drop them one at a time through the slot of a piggy bank? The slot option may be OK if you have only a few cents, but dumping is much quicker and more convenient. We feel the same […]

Here’s something we haven’t seen in a while: The HP Deskjet 6540 is a home-office color inkjet printer priced at $130. And that’s all it is. By that we mean that, despite the surge in affordable, desk-space-saving multifunction peripherals, the 6540 isn’t also a copier, scanner or fax machine — it’s just a printer. It […]

China’s Lenovo, the proud new owner of the IBM ThinkPad swears it won’t lessen the notebook’s reputation for first-class quality and engineering. Still, many business travelers can’t help wondering whether Big Blue’s sellout means they should look for a new laptop brand — ideally, one with a slightly lower price and slightly more office-productivity than […]

Thanks to a new computer case design by Intel called BTX, computer manufacturers can now build systems that run substantially quieter than previous PCs. Gateway is one of the first to take advantage of the new BTX form factor with its E-6300 system. We’re still geek enough that when a new twist to computing comes […]

One of the golden rules, or at least golden oversimplifications, of portable PCs is that low-priced laptops are bulky and heavy, while slim and light notebooks are expensive and have small screens. WinBook has stepped up to prove that even with the recent release of faster, fancier processors, Intel’s original Centrino platform can still satisfy […]

Okay, we admit it. Sometimes we just have to look at something because it’s cool, even if it’s not terribly practical for most SMBs — not until the price comes down, anyway. Case in point: British company Pelham Sloane’s new computer that packs all the components into the monitor. The result is one sleek, attractive […]

When you consider that color laser printer prices have slipped below $500 without losing that famously good plain paper output, why would any one choose an inkjet printer for the office? HP has an answer, or at least a plausible argument, in its Business Inkjet 1200. The new printer is not only cheaper to buy […]

No one denies that Tablet PCs offer more functionality and versatility than conventional notebooks — especially the swivel-screened “convertible” models that flip cleverly from clipboard (pen input) to notebook (keyboard) form. But such systems have barely dented the laptop market for three main reasons: they’re too expensive, too heavy and have too little battery life […]