Remember what typewriter keyboards felt like?

First, they'd add a phone jack for plugging in the modem. (Until they do, we'll keep packing our grab-bag of cords and adapters. On long and important trips, we also pack a modem accessory that attaches to the phone's receiver in cases where we can't make a proper wired hookup.) Second, hotels would put electrical HP Compaq NC6400 battery outlets for laptop travelers near the hotel room's table or desk. Instead, outlets tend to be under beds, behind headboards or behind TV tables.

In one fancy suite, the only free outlet was behind the walnut cabinet housing the TV. We could use it only by threading the laptop's cord through the small hole in the cabinet's rear.If you're like the people in that Macintosh PowerBook commercial, better get at least a 500M disk. If you're a typical user, 100M may be adequate for now.

The Canon NoteJet has a 486 processor, 4M of RAM, the Bubble-Jet printer, and a whopping 120M drive. Its screen is black and white but, surprisingly, we rarely wish it were color. What we do miss is space! Somehow, we managed to fill up the hard disk within a couple months. We upgraded to MS-DOS 6 to get some room.

File management is a lot more flexible, thanks to very good drag-and-drop features. Want to pop open a folder, pick just one file, and put it on your desktop? Windows 3.1 won't let you, but the Macintosh will, and so will OS/2. Want to delete a program? With OS/2, you just drag the icon over to a "shredder" and fling it in. That's a big improvement over Windows.

How much battery time can you count on? For most of us, it's about two-thirds of the manufacturer's figure. Two to four hours is common. For more money, you can get close to six Or you can buy a brand with short HP Pavilion DV9000 Battery life and an extra set or two of batteries.

Remember what typewriter keyboards felt like? Then you'll love the Canon keyboard. It responds like an old Smith Corona. But a few keys are put in unique positions, and that's a nuisance. Finding DELETE is still a challenge.

It's the printer that makes this machine so special. The printer adds weight, too. Nonetheless, the whole package totals out at 7.7 pounds.

For one thing, there's hardly any real OS/2 software on the market. Users will end up HP Pavilion DV8000 Battery doing nearly all their work on DOS or Windows programs. OS/2 seems to run DOS perfectly well. Windows software works, too, but slower. A handful of programs won't run at all. For instance, my new MCI Internet software refuses to work with OS/2.

Some OS/2 features are surprisingly crude. For instance, why didn't they imitate the Windows File Manager? In Windows, you can get a nice split-screen listing of every directory on a disk, and detailed information on each file in a directory. OS/2's file directory isn't nearly as well-designed.