If you think that the current rage about mini-notebooks will just fade and go away soon, think again. Word on the street is that Intel could be launching the first dual-core Atom processors as early as next month. Moving ahead, Intel seems to have already cooked up the technology to selectively "switch off" individual cores on a multi-core processor in the name of power efficiency; guess where the technology will eventually end up?

Some of you might have known that I use a Sony Vaio TZ-series [1] laptop as my personal work machine. The key words being "personal" and "work" respectively, I bring its minuscule 2.6 pounds practically everywhere I go. While its specifications and price certainly outclass that of standard mini-notebooks, it does run off a puny 1.06 GHz processor to get its five to six hours of runtime on a single charge. Despite that, I must say that I have never felt hindered by lackluster performance.

Of course, it has been a while since I needed to compile something in Microsoft Visual Studio, debug SQL code off a locally-hosted database server, or fired up Photoshop for some heavy-duty retouching of photos. Then again, most folks don't need to do that on a daily basis either.

My point is that mini-notebooks are here to stay.

Anyway, if there's one sacrifice that I wish I didn't have to make with a laptop, it would be the number of external displays that can typically be supported (one). If you find yourself in a similar conundrum, you might want to take a look at the Matrox's DualHead2Go [2], which probably will work well with most laptops. Or, if you are a real stickler about graphics performance, you can check out the Magma ExpressBox1 [3], which allows you to run a full-fledged PCI-Express graphics card right from your laptop. - Paul [4]