I liked it a lot particularly because it has an internal DVD drive – a

I liked it a lot, particularly because it has an internal DVD drive – a rarity among the ultralights.Gateway is always strong on power, and didn’t take prisoners with its 366Mhz, but with the weight just over 5.9lb one can question the “ultralight” category. It is easier to carry around with all the necessary drives inbuilt, but the frequency of use of DVD didn’t seem to merit the trade-off with significant increase of weight. And so I resumed my search for the Holy Laptop Grail.I must confess, after my terribly scientific evaluation process and multivariate comparative analysis using intelligent online search engines, I finally succumbed to reasons a lot less logical. Their shop is a cross between a cybercafe and the reception of an advertising agency, and it is great fun to test everything newwith a Gateway Man on hand to explain the new gizmos.The cows theme for the interior design is somewhat disconcerting; one wonders how lonely life must be in the Sioux City, where the Gateway crowd comes from. Neat machine, great performance, but the keys give flat, almost impossible-to-feel tactile feedback, and mistakes roll down even with serious effort and concentration.One of my favourite hangouts in London is the Covent Garden shop run by our friends with a cow fetish, the Gateway boys. Accuracy goes out the window on bad keyboards, and you end up spending a lot of time correcting mistakes.Having dealt with my legacy loyalties to Toshiba, I turned to one of the lightest toys on the market, the lovely Acer TravelMate.

I waltzed into one of my favourite shops, knowing my prices inside out having diligently researched the issue on the Internet. So all I needed to test was the tactile experience of the keyboards, multimedia quality, weights and quality of the design.The Portege failed the keyboard tests, as the keyboard was slippery and would cause a significant decrease of my typing speed. But I kept looking at News reviews of the latest portables, and settled on four candidates. First, the Toshiba Portege 3020CT, which would be the natural upgrade path from my current notebook. If you are a multimedia or DVD freak, issues such as the position of the speakers matter, as often the speakers are hidden in the keyboard, limiting the power of the sound.All in all then, lots of variables and not an easy buying process. My old Toshiba, which takes up more space than a small car, expired after just an hour: the time had come to bite the bullet and update my kit.Feeding frequency is important, as the most powerful box in the world is pretty much useless without a significant battery charge.

Since you will be stroking it a lot, keyboard quality, the depth of tactile feedback and the size of the keys are critical to your speed of work and ease of use. However, with the new wave of ultralight notebooks, portable computers are moving into a completely new era.
This was sharply brought to my attention during a recent flight from LA, when a kid next to me played games for over six hours on his tiny Sony Vaio, and then nonchalantly slipped it into a mini-knapsack. Laptops and mobile computing have been growing furiously over the last two years. I have been a laptop user for over five years now, and still warmly remember the clunky Toshibas and lovely but back-breaking IBM Thinkpads.

That means having to conquer foreign phone sockets, temperamental electricity systems and dubious roaming agreements from my ISP. COME THE summer holidays, I always get in a panic over delivering this column from various exotic parts of the world. A lucrative business doesn’t usually get made into a lucrative website without radical re-thinking and fundamental transformation.Maybe a great online look and a great on-shelf look are fundamentally different challenges as well.Jason Cranford Teague is the author of `DHTML For the World Wide Web’.If you have questions, you can find an archive of his column at Webbed Environments ( www.webbedenvironemtns ) or e-mail him at jason webbedenvironemts .. This is just one example of how the world doesn’t always translate obviously from one medium to another.Great product literature can’t become a great online resource with just a scanner and Adobe Acrobat. So an easy first step I’d say is to pick the colours on the monitor you use most.Then I think it is a good idea to try to see what everyone will be seeing. At i-on ( www.i-on ), one of the top Web-design firms in south Florida, they have a farm of monitors of all stripe for solving this very dilemma.Most of all I recommend not getting your expectations up too high about screen and print matching.

The problem is, of course, that I can’t predict the exact outcome on the visitor’s machine. Any recommendations on how to make the colours as close as possible to their real-life counterparts?BS It is a real problem as the line begins to blur between reality and cyberspace, isn’t it? I wonder when we’ll hear more of the opposite problem: a company started on the web wants stationery or packaging to match its web colours and can’t seem to get it right with inks.The wondrous human eye can compensate for a lot and I tend to think people get used to their own monitors. What I intended to do with my browser-safe colour palette poster is to make the 216-colour set a little more accessible, a little more visible. I’m not at all religious about sticking with the palette myself, but I still find it handy to know where it is and make conscious individual decisions whether or not to stay browser-safe.JCT Right now I’m working on a project where I am trying to re-create the colours of products as colour swatches on the web. A subtle pastel gradient can look so sharp if done really right. And I tend to think users (with older computers) blame themselves and their computers more than they do site owners, especially after they’ve gotten used to things clearly looking out of kilter.On the other hand, there are still cases where it makes sense to stick to the palette, in page, table and GIF backgrounds, and in text colours, where a palette colour will do fine.