On the road. (Hardware Review) (Walkabout/SX) (evaluation)

On The Road

The first impression of the Data General Walkabout/SX is that itis a very smoothly assembled system. Although the unit is heavier than I would like to carry for long distances, the weight is certainly not out of line for the power of this system.

Data General's product announcement claimed a weight of 16 pounds, but an evaluation unit, equipped with the AC power pack, one of the manuals, six floppy disks, and a mouse in the nylon carrying case weighed in at 22 pounds. Although a fully charged battery provides power for several hours, the first indication of low-battery condition is so close to a no-battery condition that traveling without the power pack is not advisable.

Although a half-speed option is available to extend battery life, the system generally operates at 16MHz. Data General's Bellevue, Washington office was equipped with an 80387SX floating point chip, 8Mbytes of RAM, a 40Mbyte hard drive and a 144 Mbyte floppy.

The hard drive showed an average access time of 23.4 ms under the CORE disk I/O test , with a Norton Compute Index of 17.6. An overall Norton System Index was not feasible, possibly because of the 2Mbyte disk cache that was installed in the system. This cache, which requires a fairly large RAM installation, did make the disk access seem much faster than the speed …