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Lightweight windows
Published on 7/16/97

Have you ever wanted to take your Word documents, phone numbers, and appointments with you on the road and have instant access to them? If so, you might have considered a laptop, but they can get heavy and take a long time to boot up. Well, what about a palmtop, a computer that can fit in your hand? Why not?!

Palmtops make nice alternatives to laptops. Although you don't get all the bells and whistles of a laptop, such as a color display and full width keyboard, you do get instant access to you phone numbers and appointments. Where does Windows fit in? Microsoft released Windows CE about one year ago. Windows CE is a very abbreviated version of Windows 95. Microsoft has said that the "CE" does not stand for anything in particular, but rather implies a number of precepts around which Windows CE is designed. Some of these being compact, connectable, compatible, companion, and efficient. The interface is similar to and just as easy to use as Windows 95. The major difference between CE and 95 is that CE can run on less than 5 MB of ROM! Also, CE does not have a boot-up sequence like a regular PC. When you turn on a palmtop, Windows CE is ready for your command within seconds!

One area that is a major obstacle is storage. Because the palmtop was made to be small and compact it does not have a hard drive. Instead, Windows CE is preinstalled on a ROM chip. Everything else is stored in onboard RAM. Most companies offer a palmtop model with 2 MB RAM and one with 4 MB RAM. Don't worry though, you can add more RAM by means of a PCMCIA card or a new Compact Flash disk. While you won't get much more storage, you shouldn't run into any problems, because Windows CE compresses just about everything in order to save space.

As far as the display goes, most palmtops feature a 480x240 LCD screen. The screen only has four colors: black, white, light gray, and dark gray. Hewlett Packard is currently the only manufacturer to offer a full width display of 640x240. Most models also feature a iridescent green-colored backlight. Windows CE is navigated using a stylus and/or the palmtop's built-in keyboard.

One of the most important features to many people is the ability to connect to the Internet. With a PCMCIA modem it is possible to send/receive e-mail, send faxes, and browse the web.

Solitaire, Pocket Internet Explorer, Inbox, Pocket Word, Pocket Excel, and a few other Windows standard programs are included in Windows CE. Handheld PC Explorer, or H/PC Explorer for short, is used to synchronize your palmtop with your desktop. You can transfer contacts, appointments, and to-do lists right from Microsoft Outlook '97 to the palmtop.

The palmtop does not feature a 486, Pentium, or anything like that, but rather a specially designed chip. One such chip is made by Hitachi. The 32-bit Super H RISC Microprocessor runs at 44MHz. Plenty of power for Windows CE. So what are you waiting for, go out and get your very own palmtop and never be unorganized again! For more information, visit Microsoft's Windows CE web site, at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsce/ .