The market leading Alpha notebook range has had a specification and pricing face lift with the introduction of faster processors offering near Omega performance, lower prices and a Centrino based Notebook with built-in wireless networking.

The NEW slimline Alpha M6 Notebook uses the very latest high performance, low powered Intel portable computer processor technology to extend battery life and performance. For instance battery life running RISC OS increases to about two hours, which represents a 25% improvement on our Celeron and Pentium based portables. If you are running Windows you can expect to increase in battery life to about five hours.

The Alpha M6 has a 14.1 inch screen with a 32MB of graphics memory with 1024 x 768 resolution, the base machine is fitted with a high performance 1.4GHz Intel Centrino processor with upgrade options up to 1.6GHz. RISC OS users will understand more than most that lots GHz is no real indication of a computers overall performance.

The Alpha M6 is fitted with an internal 11Mbit wireless LAN module as a standard feature giving the user truly mobile computing, yet another example of our response to the demands of this growing market.

Visit our detailed web pages for the lastest pictures, specifications and prices.

Alpha speed tests

Last week Drobe drew our attention to yet another set of benchmark tests, namely the RISCOSmark tests, and assuming our readers know about the tests we have nothing to added except that this evening we ran the test on some of our exhibition stock portable machines, with the following results.

Please note that we are not endorsing Richard’s tests, though we thank him for making them publicly available. We also thank Drobe for pointing us in Richard's direction. As for the results, they are what they are, numbers which show (a) was faster or slower than (b) in a particular set of tests.

	Alpha MI	Alpha M4	Alpha M5
Processor	35	41	45
Memory	225	382	1298
Rectangle copy	295	484	759
Icon plotting	70	110	158
Draw path	39	55	78
Draw fill	55	71	104
HD Read MB/s	96.316	119.635	150.051
HD Write MB/s	73.298	85.164	115.580
FS Read KB/s	649	802	709
FS Write KB/s	281	430	536

We were concerned at the high speed hard disc read and write results achieved by VRPC when compared to the poor results apparently achieved by the Iyonix. So we asked David P to have a quick look at the results. He agreed they looked unreal so he ran the same tests from a RAM disc and again the hard disc gave the similar high results regarding the VRPC, he concluded that the results were most probably tied into the way VRPC was written to handle hard disc drives, no problem just ignore the hard disc read/write tests as the other results look fine.

We checked the Iyonix results with one of our users who has both machines and they confirmed that the results posted on Richard's web site for the Iyonix were correct, give or take a percent or two.

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