First post, by Zack_H
- Rank
- Newbie
New member here! Happy to be a part of this great forum!
This is a laptop I got recently that I had been wanting for a very long time. It has also quickly become one of my new favorite Pentium III laptops (along with me Dell Inspiron 8000/8100s).
This is one of the fully-rugged military-spec models, meaning that the entire outer case is magnesium. The only case part that isn't magnesium is the palm rest, which is made out of a very strong, glass fiber reinforced plastic! It's VERY strong.
I knew this thing would make a great mobile Windows 98/2000 machine, because unlike most old laptops, you don't have to worry about the fragility of this one. My main concern in traveling with an old laptop is too much weight getting on top of the unit, which usually results in a broken LCD panel. That's not an issue here!
One of the coolest features about this machine is the touchscreen! Yep, touchscreen on a Pentium III laptop! And the amazing thing about it is that it actually works very well once you get the hang of it. It does require more pressure to operate than a modern touchscreen, but that is to be expected.
Mine also has the nicer-to-type-on, but less-water-proof keyboard. They offered an optional rubber keyboard on these that's just nasty to type on from what I've heard. The keyboard that mine has is very nice, and I love typing on it.
The trackpad on this laptop is quite interesting, because it actually works with pressure. This one done so the trackpad could be used while you were wearing gloves. The unfortunate side-affect of this is that the trackpad overall doesn't work as well as a normal one, but I am staring to get used to it. It's a small trade-off in my opinion to have an old laptop that is this durable! And having a nice touch screen makes it even less of an issue.
Here are the specs of this laptop;
500MHz Pentium III (I think it is a Coppermine, but I haven't found out for sure yet)
192MB of RAM (can be expanded ti 320MB; I'll probably do that eventually)
60GB hard drive (I installed this; didn't have a hard drive at all when I got it)
Silicone Motion LynxEM graphics with 4MB of VRAM (according to DXDiag)
SVGA 800 x 600 12.1" Touchscreen LCD
Probably nothing too spectacular, but I love this little ToughBook! I did also try Half Life on it, and that ran great.
Also, I'm running a Windows 98/2000 dual-boot on this machine, which are the best two OSes for this thing in my opinion. It could technically run XP, but since I have a Dell Inspiron 8100 and 8200, there would be no point in me running XP on this. And Windows XP on an 800 x 600 display is a little cramped too. IMO you really need at least 1024 x 768 for XP.
I should also mention that this entire post is being typed up on this ToughBook, using K-Meleon 74 under Windows 2000!
That's all for now. Let me know what you think of this ToughBook! And also, what are your favorite Pentium III era laptops? I'd love to hear about which one you all like and why.
Starting Windows 95. . .
