As you can see from the table, the Acer averaged 12.8MB/sec while the Dell had more than double the performance, at an average of 27.9MB/sec. Even that was slow by comparison to our desktop 7200RPM drive, which performed at 49.6MB/sec. Of course, unless you're lugging a huge desktop-replacement laptop, laptop drives are always going to be slower than their desktop big brothers.

Drive performance is always an issue, but it becomes a critical issue when the system has relatively little RAM. Windows works by swapping out the less-used memory data from RAM to the hard drive, so machines with less physical memory will tend to swap more. In the older machine's case, it's swapping more often to the slowest performing drive -- a double-whammy.

Subjective needs
As I moved forward with this article, I chose to use both machines interchangeably. I had the ideal testing environment this summer, when we moved from New Jersey to Florida. During the move process, we had to take a long house-hunting trip down to Florida, and then, we had to move.

During the actual move, both my working office and our home was in the moving truck, so I had to rely on the laptops to do everything from manage my email to writing articles and getting the issues out each week.

I found that I could use both laptops interchangeably for writing articles. The Acer was obviously slower, but it really wasn't more than an annoyance. Likewise, I could use both machines equally for browsing the Web, with a slight edge going to the Acer because I could flip the screen and read the Web in tablet form, just like I'd read a book.

Where the Acer completely failed was email. Between press releases, business correspondence, and spam, I get more than 7,000 messages a day, which I read in Outlook 2003. Rather than keeping the mail on our company's servers (located in the former command and control center of a former Air Force base in Illinois), I download my messages each day to my computer. The way mail works, if your mail client doesn't send a "I got the message" notification back to the server in a reasonable time, the server doesn't consider the mail delivered.

The older Acer couldn't keep up with the processing of my mail, which required downloading, spam filtering, rule processing, and eventual display. The overload resulted in my getting two, three, and even four copies of my messages. Imagine, if you will the following scenario. Everything you own is in a truck somewhere between New Jersey and Florida. You're in a hotel somewhere in the middle of North Carolina. You've been driving for ten hours and you've got to get your email, write an article, and put out five magazines.

All of a sudden, your email decides to download three times over. You've now got 21,000 messages downloading, you still can't get the latest, critical messages from the server, it's after midnight, and you've got to be back on the road the next morning.