IBM's No-Hassle Travel Buddy

When you travel with a laptop, how often do you really need a floppy drive or CD-ROM while on a plane or in an airport lounge? If you're like me, hardly ever. That's why I've always thought it was a great idea to put the essential components of a computer into one thin, light box and keep the CD-ROM and other accessories in a separate unit.

This is hardly an original idea. Going back to the defunct Digital Equipment HiNote Ultra of 1995, many manufacturers have tried combining a bare-bones laptop with a separate ''slice'' for accessories. But none of these products found much commercial success. So IBM thought long and hard before choosing a slice design for the ThinkPad 570, successor to the groundbreaking thin, light ThinkPad 560.

ADD-ONS. Because of my past enthusiasm for designs that didn't become popular, my judgment may be suspect. But I believe the ThinkPad 570 could be a hit with mobile executives. Ignoring for the moment the add-on unit that IBM calls the UltraBase, the 570 compares very favorably to its three-year-old predecessor. At 4 lb. and 1.1-in. thick, it's actually a tiny bit lighter and thinner. The case is 0.7 in. deeper, but that allowed designers to replace the 12.1-in., 800x600 pixel display with a 13.3-in., 1040x768 screen.

The basic laptop has a full complement of standard ports and an excellent keyboard and display but no floppy or CD-ROM drive. To get those, you have to mate the 570 with the UltraBase, a unit that adds about an inch to the laptop's thickness and, depending on what options are installed, about three pounds to its weight.

The UltraBase, a $119 option, contains two bays. One can hold drives for a CD-ROM ($135), a DVD-ROM ($335), an LS-120 SuperDisk ($225), or a Zip disk ($269). The other can take either the standard floppy drive or a second battery (a pricey $209), which doubles battery power to between five and seven hours. IBM also offers a couple of approaches for linking the laptop to standard monitors or keyboards for desktop use. Corporate-systems managers will appreciate the fact that most accessories for the widely used ThinkPad 600 model will fit in the 570's bay. Batteries are an exception.

The design of the 570 overcomes the most serious drawbacks of past slice attempts. First, it is really easy to join and separate the two pieces--no screws, no tricky alignment problems, and no rebooting. To mate them, you set the laptop against a lip at the front of the base, lower it into place, and press firmly. I found I could easily do it with my eyes closed, which was not remotely true of any previous slice that I tried. To separate them, you press a button on the front of the base. When a light goes out, indicating that Windows is ready for undocking, you flick two levers and the laptop lifts off. I docked and undocked the 570 while it was running with no problems.

Second, when joined, the laptop and base have the feel of a hefty (6.9-lb.), but manageable, laptop. Some clever design touches make the 570 with the base look thinner than its 2 inches and, at that, it is in fact a bit thinner and a lot lighter than either the top-of-the-line ThinkPad 770 or the rival slice design Compaq Armada 3500.

TRADE-OFFS. If you need a CD-ROM and floppy on the road, I think the 570 makes more sense than thin-and-light laptops such as the Toshiba Portege 7100 or Hewlett-Packard's OmniBook 900, which rely on external accessories with awkward cables. The real choice is between the slice and a more conventional thin notebook with an internal bay, such as the ThinkPad 600 or a Dell Latitude CPi, which are around 1 1/2 in. thick and weigh about 6 lb.

The 570 has improved the terms of the trade-off between convenience in use and convenience in travel. So while I have been a big fan of the conventional thin laptop, I'm going to give the 570 a place in my road-warrior kit. The two big advantages I see: The thin unit will fit more easily into my carry-on briefcase while the base travels in luggage, allowing it to be wheeled rather than carried through airports. And the thin base means it should be more usable on airplanes than most 13.3-in. laptops. For example, the 570 display works just fine on the tray table of a Boeing 747-400 coach cabin seat even when the seat in front is fully reclined. The ThinkPad 600 is just a little too tall, as I learned when I nearly lost one on a recent United flight.

It remains to be seen whether IBM's slice can succeed where so many others have failed. But it is the best design of its type that I've seen, and if it can't make it, I'm prepared to abandon hope for the category.

BY STEPHEN H. WILDSTROM

Network Workhorse

Most inkjet printers are great for limited numbers of color documents. But if your small business or office churns out printed matter by the ream, you need a heavy-duty network printer. The new Phaser 840 from Tektronix (800 835-6100 or www.tek.com) may fit the bill. The Phaser 840, starting at around $2,500, uses easy-to-load solid ink that is melted and deposited on paper for vibrant color. It prints up to 10 pages per minute in color or monochrome, slower than most laser printers for black-only output but significantly faster for color. A Hewlett-Packard Color LaserJet 4500 turns out 16 black-and-white pages a minute but only four in color.

Although the Phaser 840 price is about the same as a color laser, the cost of supplies is much lower, in part because Tektronix supplies free black ink for the life of the printer. The company estimates cost at 1.2 cents to 5.7 cents a page, depending on coverage and the mix of black and color, vs. 5 cents to 12 cents a page for laser rivals. Phaser options include paper storage for 1,200 sheets, automatic two-sided printing, and automated collating, but not stapling, of documents. The Phaser 840 works with all flavors of Windows and DOS, Macintosh, and Unix workstations.

Tektronix Phaser 840 Color Printer

Help Desk

Q: Responding to my Apr. 5 column about online anonymity, Allison Blackman Dunham of Brooklyn, N.Y., writes: ''My work requires me to be online each day. Since I am online so much and in the public eye, I am all too familiar with the dark side of cyberspace. The Net allows people from all parts of the globe to have access to the advice and services that I and Jessica Blackman Freedman (AKA The Advice Sisters), offer. However, those who are angry, immature, or just plain nuts can act out on the Net with few consequences. I have been the victim of a death threat and have been harassed and humiliated on several newsgroups. Death threats and impersonating someone...are crimes in real life.... They should be taken seriously in the virtual world as well...but often they are not. Not one of the Internet authorities or service providers would step forward and assist us.''

A: Death threats are definitely a crime in cyberspace, and fraudulent impersonation very well may be. Any online threat should be reported to your local FBI office, though you may have to be insistent to be taken seriously. Beyond overt threats, however, there's not a lot you can do about bad behavior. And, unfortunately, software that provides bad actors with a cloak of anonymity may only make things worse.

Web Destinations

search.corbis.com
Corbis, a company created by Microsoft CEO William H. Gates III to license electronic images, is making part of its vast archive of artwork, photographs, and historical images available to retail customers. For $3, you can download a snapshot-size image suitable for use in a school report, slide presentation, or on a personal Web site. (Commercial use requires a different, and more expensive, license.) For about $30 and up, Corbis sells photo-quality framed prints and posters of thousands of the images in its collection, including the works of famed landscape photographer Ansel Adams.

www.strategy.com
Sign up for the free DSS Stock Market service available on this site and you'll get a daily report, delivered to your E-mail inbox, pager, or both, on market developments and the performance of your own selected portfolio of stocks. The service, while useful in its own right, is also a demonstration of MicroStrategy's DSS Broadcaster, a technology that allows database information to be formatted for and delivered to a wide variety of devices. The Stock Market service also delivers a weekly portfolio summary, formatted for the spreadsheet of your choice.

www.joboptions.com/bwni
Web-based job-search sites have proliferated in the past year or so, but this joint project of the Business Women's Network and JobOptions aims specifically to help women find managerial, professional, and technical positions. Like most such services, it is free for job seekers. But potential employers pay to post openings and search resumes, starting at $150 for a single posting. The site also features links to a variety of resources designed to assist women in business.

www.flagnet.com
Need a Tuvaluan flag? Or want to see the flag that flew over Ft. Sumter at the start of the Civil War? Flagnet.com boasts that it can supply ''every flag that ever flew,'' and after perusing the site, I have no reason to doubt the claim. In addition to flags of all the world's nations, Flagnet features banners from a large number of provinces and other political subdivisions as well as flags of historical interest, at prices ranging from about $40 to $120, depending on size. The company will also provide custom flags, such as a fanciful one for Oz. One complaint: Flagnet could use a good spell-checker to catch numerous spelling errors in place names.