Welcome to a laptop battery specialist of the Toshiba Laptop Battery
''I.B.M. has brought 1980's processor technology into the 1990's,'' quipped Bill Lempesis, an analyst with Dataquest, a market research firm in San Jose, Calif. But Mr. Lempesis praised the company's new disk drives, which give the user access to as many as 320 megabytes of data with an average access speed of 12.5 milliseconds. He also praised I.B.M.'s endorsement of scuzzy technology, which allows great flexibility in attaching ''intelligent'' disk drives and other peripherals to the computers. ''It's just a shame that they had to marry all that to a lackluster 386-based model 80,'' he said.
Analysts said the issue was whether the market for consumer devices beyond high-end digital cameras would emerge quickly enough to justify the new small disk. The new drives are unlikely to be used in existing laptops or even the newest generation of so-called subnotebook laptops like Toshiba Tecra 9000 Battery , Toshiba Tecra 9100 Battery , Toshiba Satellite 1900 Battery , Toshiba Satellite A60-662 Battery , Toshiba Satellite A65 Battery , Toshiba Satellite 2100 Battery , Toshiba PA3107U-1BAS Battery , Toshiba PA3383U-1BAS Battery , Toshiba PA3384U-1BAS Battery , Toshiba PA3285U-1BAS Battery , Toshiba PA3191U-1BAS Battery , Toshiba PA3166U-1BAS Battery , which are using another type of small disk drive that measures 2.5 inches and is coming in increasingly thinner versions.
I.B.M., which now controls 40 percent of that market, recently began shipping a drive that is 9.5 millimeters thick, compared with the current standard of 12.5 millimeters.
''This is an engineering marvel,'' said James Porter, president of Disk/Trend Inc., a market research firm in Mountain View, Calif. ''However, they still have to create a new market. I think they will probably take some time for these to develop.''
To confuse things further, many companies sell what they call enhanced E.G.A. cards that offer the superior resolution of V.G.A., and enhanced V.G.A. cards that offer better-than-V.G.A. performance.
Simply put, V.G.A. is better than E.G.A, especially for people who use color. (The Compaq Computer Corporation, the computer maker that has historically defended the standards set by I.B.M. - becoming more I.B.M.-compatible than I.B.M. itself - has embraced V.G.A., which is sort of like the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.) What does V.G.A. offer? Its resolution, or sharpness of display, is excellent. V.G.A. supports screen resolutions of 640 picture elements horizontally by 480 pels vertically. (Picture elements are known as pels, or pixels, or dots.) That represents a slight improvement over E.G.A. (enhanced graphics adapter), which offered 640 by 350.