Grex Hardware Conference

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Grex Hardware Item 103: wanted: a good laptop.
Entered by brown on Sat Jan 20 15:28:58 UTC 1996:

I am in the market for a laptop/notebook. I'll need a good, totally
independant working machine that could be upgraded possibly. 
I'd appreciate suggestions, pros/cons, or any ideas anyone might have.

10 responses total.

#1 of 10 by mcpoz on Sat Jan 20 16:05:42 1996:

In the ann arbor news someone is selling a new 486 laptop at a closeout price
of $699.  it is in the classified section.

#2 of 10 by scg on Sun Jan 21 08:42:18 1996:

Do you know what speed of 486, and with how much RAM?  There's an incredible
range there.

#3 of 10 by mcpoz on Sun Jan 21 11:00:32 1996:

No, it was a small ad and it looked like a business.  I think it was in the
517 area code.

#4 of 10 by brown on Sat Jan 27 13:16:14 1996:

I'd probably go new, who knows. Was thinkin' IBM. would like 'a good
hunk' of memory. but will have to weigh it out with the price, other features
and such.

#5 of 10 by gull on Tue Jan 30 06:00:35 1996:

I've been pricing laptops lately.  IBM no doubt makes good machines, but
they charge half again as much as anyone else, and they're stingy with RAM
on the low end of their line.  I don't really want to consider anything
with less than 8 megs of RAM, and all of IBM's under $3000 machines seem to
come with 4.

#6 of 10 by rcurl on Tue Jan 30 07:51:07 1996:

I'm sold on Mac Powerbooks. I got mine upgraded to 8 megs RAM - and then
got RamDoubler for $50, which gives me 16 megs. Hard to beat AppleTalk
for intermachine file transfer and printing, too. I am considering upgrading
the HD from 80M to 160M (this is an old Powerbook...).

#7 of 10 by scg on Wed Jan 31 05:10:03 1996:

RAM Doubler doesn't really give you 16 megs.  It optimizes things to make it
seem as if you have more memory than you do, but real memory is a lot faster.

#8 of 10 by rcurl on Wed Jan 31 06:58:18 1996:

It gives me an effective 16 megs, in regard to how many applications I
can keep open simultaneously. This is especially nice when running
Netscape, Telnet, Fetch, and several other clients and applications
simultaneously. OK, its slow. Its faster than doing it my hand..  8^}
(in fact, when used to keep a number of IP/TCP clients open at the
same time, I notice no speed reduction).

#9 of 10 by ajax on Fri Feb 2 08:57:24 1996:

The Win95 RAM Doubler (or perhaps it's a different-but-similar product
name) is the number 2 selling PC software title, but PC Magazine said it
could find no diff with it or without it, except that it changes a couple
params in your config files, which you can change without the software.
The publisher maintains that it does do some good in certain circumstances,
but it sounds like an amazing con job.

Back to the topic at hand, the upgradability of laptops is generally not
too good...you can usually add memory or bigger disks, but not a faster
processor or better graphics capability.  There are exceptions, but you
usually pay quite a bit more up front if it's got a good upgrade path.

#10 of 10 by tsty on Sun Mar 3 07:39:55 1996:

hmmm, anyone have any ideas about increasing the ram on this 'lil-'ol
Zenith supersport 286? 640K can really suck at times.

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