Intel announced that it would introduce a whole family of mobile Coppermine processors on October 25th last, and lulled a lot of manufacturers into a false sense of security. Compaq announced it would introduce machines using the mobile Coppermine technology that day but most of the big names did not follow suit. Now, Dell has announced it has a couple of the portables up for sale, only a week or so after Toshiba did the same thing. We revealed just one day after the announcement of the notebook that there were serious shortages of mobile Coppermines -- with distributors being told that they could not expect quantities of the chips until next year, at the earliest. So it has taken nearly two months for the processors to appear. One of the vendors above -- we won't pinpoint which one because we said we wouldn't -- complained bitterly that it had only received Coppermine mobile samples a few days, rather than the normal few months, before Intel pre-launched them. And so it has taken a couple of months for the machines to finally become available. ® Hugh shortages, technical problems mar Coppermine launch