The shining feature of the WinBook Si is its 800MHz Pentium III processor. Unlike most other notebooks, the WinBook Si uses the desktop version of the Pentium III 800 in order to cut costs significantly. By going with this processor, you save several hundred dollars and get excellent performance but lose battery life due to the lack of Intel's SpeedStep technology.

The base WinBook Si comes with 64MB of SDRAM, though we had ours upgraded to 128MB. The upgrade costs an expensive $275. You can definitely save a lot of money by buying the base machine at $1999 and then upgrading with some mail-ordered memory.

Windows 98 SE comes pre-installed, and there is no option to load Windows 2000. If you want Windows 2000 in a WinBook notebook, you need to upgrade to their more expensive WinBook Si2 model. We expect most business users will want Windows 2000, and would like to see some choice in operating system.

A 6GB drive provides more than enough storage for most users. Its slow rotational speed limits performance, but then, even the 5400rpm notebook drives perform poorly. There is no other drive option, though you can upgrade to the WinBook Si2 model and get a 20GB drive.