Centrino Duo Whitebook: A Do-It-Yourself Laptop

General Usage Performance: The Winstones "Real World" Application Performance

Business Winstone 2004 from Veritest uses scripts to test the performance level of a computer in the following business related applications:

• Microsoft Access 2002
• Microsoft Excel 2002
• Microsoft FrontPage 2002
• Microsoft Outlook 2002
• Microsoft PowerPoint 2002
• Microsoft Project 2002
• Microsoft Word 2002
• Norton AntiVirus Professional Edition 2003
• WinZip 8.1

Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 from Veritest uses scripts to test the performance level of a computer in multimedia rich environments such as:

• Adobe Photoshop 7.0.1
• Adobe Premiere 6.5
• Macromedia Director MX 9.0
• Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 6.1
• Microsoft Windows Media Encoder 9 Version 9.00.00.2980
• NewTek LightWave 3D 7.5b
• Steinberg WaveLab 4.0f

The Core Duo T2600s powering our ASUS Whitebook and the Dell XPS M1710 gave them the advantage, launching them up to the top two spots. It is clear that common Office applications benefit from the extra core. With only a single core, the Turion64 processor found on the Alienware Aurora m9700 put up a good fight, but ultimately is edged out by the Core Duos despite having the highest core frequency of the bunch.

It is interesting to note that the XPS M1710 shares the exact same processor and chipset with our Whitebook but has the benefit of two times the RAM. Yet our Whitebook still manages to come out on top. This can be attributed to our whitebook's 1.5Gb/s SATA hard drive which stomps all over the XPS M1710's ATA100 disk. And to our clean OS installation that was free of the "bloatware" typically associated with most off the shelf notebooks. Plus, Business Winstone's tests do not utilize significant amounts of RAM and as a result the XPS' memory configuration advantage cannot be brought to bear.

Unlike in Business Winstone, where the Core Duos edged out the Turion64 by about a point, the Duos dominate with a lead of three points in Content Creation Windstone. Our Whitebook is the overall winner again. This is unsurprising as the Content Creation Winstone tests also do not occupy a significant amount of RAM and they benefit from the previously stated advantages.