A Laptop In The Lounge Room Is The Path To Domestic Harmony

Sydney Morning Herald

Sunday July 29, 1990

By TONY SARNO

LOOK at advertisements for laptops. They're nearly always about pre-burnout workaholics who like to take their spreadsheets on trips and into lifts or aircraft cabins.

The ads ignore what is just about the most worthy place to use a laptop -your lounge room.

This is where the laptop, in front of the television, is a fortifier of relationships. Where it's good for parenthood. Where it promotes domestic bliss. Where many employees of the computer makers themselves use it, but don't make the connection.

In the days before laptops were practical machines - when they were either toys with muddy screens and no hard disks, or exhorbitantly priced boxes with all the features of desktops but the portability of sewing machines - this writer used standard desktop computers at home.

My first desktop was one of the first IBM clones ever made by the Taiwanese company Acer, an indestructible 286-based machine. It made so much noise that I had to switch it off late at night so that my wife could go to sleep in the adjoining room. The ruckus came from its fan, which worked to dissipate heat -so much that I had to keep the window open.

It was replaced by a more modern Epson AX2. This was easier on the neighbours, but still required a desk and double power point - something we could only arrange in the spare bedroom of our first home-loan flat.

When I needed to do some unpaid overtime, I would have dinner with my wife, say goodbye to her, and head for the spare bedroom. She was not particularly interested in joining me for some MS-Dos lessons so she stayed put. We were only a couple of rooms apart, but I may as well have been working late at the office.

That's now changed. The desktop has been dumped for a laptop.

If I need to catch up on some work, I make myself comfortable on the sofa and place the machine on the coffee table in front of me, alongside the diskette box. I can type away, be with my wife, hold a conversation and watch Alexei Sayle's Stuff at the same time.

And when I stare at the laptop's screen, be it a gas plasma or a backlit(or sidelit) liquid crystal display, I know for sure that I'm not being irradiated in any way.

There is no evidence that electro-magnetic radiation produced by the cathode ray tubes (CRT) used in most desktops is issued in anything other than harmless doses, even though the most viciously Luddite researchers have spent years trying to find evidence to the contrary. But when computer companies regularly announce "low-radiation" versions of CRT monitors, and others sell radiation filters for them, it makes you wonder.

And worrywarts need not fear that a laptop may look out of place next to the Bang and Olufsen stereo. Toshiba has a nice range of stylish matt black machines, though the orange and black glow of the gas plasma screens is a matter of taste.

But the laptop for the post-modernist aesthete is manufactured by Olivetti. Part of the M series, which was born in a Milan design studio, the Olivetti M316 has a milky-grey geometrically sculptured case that hints at the fusion of a wedge, rectangle and cylinder. It is partly covered with riblets which also act cleverly as heat dispersers.

The 80386SX-based machine is as functional as it is attractive, with a black-on-white, neutralised, super-twisted nematic VGA screen with contrasts and shades of grey that are film-noir sharp.

However, for succesful home laptopping, there are some minimum requirements:

* A hard disk is essential, preferably of 40 megabytes. While you can easily carry out word processing on a laptop with one or two floppy drives, you can't run many serious applications - such as large databases - without a hard disk.

* Unless you're willing to shell out $10,000 plus for a Macintosh Portable, the laptop must have a 286 chip to run most programs at an acceptable speed. Ideally, you should not settle for anything less than a 386SX chip, because, unlike the simpleton 286, this will allow multi-tasking -so you can run two programs at the same time. One of the joys of the new Windows 3.0 graphical user interface for MS-Dos is its multitasking.

* The screen must be comfortably readable under different lighting. There are some sharp non-backlit liquid display screens, as on the Mac Portable, but they will never be as readable as a backlit model.

Of these, those with screen resolution below the EGA standard are not worth bothering with. They're the models with visibly zig-zagged characters. However, Toshiba's T1000SE and XE notebook computers have a blue and white CGA-compatible screen which is better than many EGA screens. This is because they use a 640 by 400 pixel display, instead of the standard CGA's 640 by 200).

* While a laptop that runs on batteries as well as mains power is preferable for travel, battery power is not essential if the machine is just kept at home.

That way, you dispense with the nightmare of having to mother nickel cadmium batteries, the exasperating power source for virtually all laptops that use batteries. (The Mac Portable has less demanding, and much longer-lasting lead-acid batteries, but they weigh significantly more.)

Nickel cadmiums, or NiCads, remember their last charge, so that if you begin to recharge them while they have half their charge left, they will only discharge half their power. You should charge them only when they are fully drained.

Many laptops with batteries and mains power are built so you can't run them on mains without charging the batteries as well.

Problems arise when the NiCad battery has only a small charge left, but you want to make the computer carry out a task by itself that will take a few hours - say re-indexing a database - just before you go to bed.

You know the battery may last only another half hour, but if you switch on the mains power to keep the computer going through the night, the NiCad will not charge to its full capacity because it isn't fully drained.

The experts advise that, with battery-powered laptops, you use a minimum of two NiCads and a separate charger. When one is used up, place it in the charger, use the full one, and keep alternating.

Eventually, you learn to structure your life around the NiCads.