For one thing, the Dell Inspiron had aggravating little plastic spacers to occupy empty PC Card slots. No more worries about losing little bits of plastic. That kind of attention to detail is what separates mere functionality from outstanding usability. Another example was the VP 745's combination floppy and CD-ROM drive. The need for both is obvious to every computer user, but surprisingly few notebook manufacturers have caught on yet.
Battery life makes or breaks a notebook.
The HiNote's lithium-ion battery had an LED on the side to show battery charge remaining. Pentium II notebooks certainly are speedy, but Pentium MMX notebooks are much cheaper and have longer battery life and often larger screens. That's because a Pentium II chip combined with a large screen drains the battery fast. Probably 80 percent of all work done on notebooks is simple word processing, so a Pentium MMX has more than enough power. And because there are no new mobile operating systems on the horizon, you can set up a stable configuration on a Pentium MMX and forget upgrade worries for about three years.