MaxPac 6000: a workstation in a briefcase from MaxVision. (reviews).

 
Stats 
 
MaxPac 6000 
 
Price as reviewed: 
$6950 
 
MaxVision 
www.maxvision.com 
 
infoNOW 93 

LAPTOPS ARE great for many applications, and you can use them on airplanes or almost anywhere. Their mobility has tradeoffs, however. For power conservation purposes, laptops usually have CPUs and graphics a generation or two behind that of the fastest workstations. And, to make a laptop compact enough to carry, the screen has to be much smaller than a typical workstations.

Yet there are lots of people on the move who need a computer more powerful than a laptop. Architects and engineers might need a CAD workstation at a building site, for example. Video editors sometimes have to work in strange locations, and visual effects artists could be asked to do test composites at a remote set. These people need lots of horsepower and high quality graphics in a computer with a screen that's big enough to display the graphics.

MaxVision's MaxPac 6000, which was created to address these sorts of needs, is different from most computers I've seen. It's a high-quality workstation with a fast CPU and graphics card and a 17-inch LCD tucked inside what looks like a fat aluminum briefcase. At just over 20 pounds, the MaxPac is considerably heftier than a laptop, and it plugs into an electrical outlet rather than running on batteries. But it can be carried, unlike stationary workstations of similar horsepower.

The machine comes in a number of flavors. The review unit ran Windows 2000 and had a 1.4GHZ Athlon processor along with 512MB of DDR RAM, a 40cB hard drive, CD-ROM and LS120 superdrive floppy, and an Elsa Synergy III video card. MaxVision also offers configurations with Intel Pentium 4 processors as well as single-and dual-processor Pentium III machines. A number of other video cards, disks, and memory options are also available.

Setting up the machine is easy. You attach the power cord, then plug in the mouse and keyboard. A flip of the power switch and you're off and running. The LCD screen is of excellent quality and displays 1280 by 1024 in true color. The machine also has an external monitor port if you want to use a projector or second CRT with it.

Cleverly stowed inside the top lid are the keyboard and mouse, hidden under a fiberboard panel that you remove by bending the panel into an arch and pulling it out. This ...