Old laptops are a nice thing, because everything they have is period correct - the case, screen, keyboard, internal components, so you have exactly the same experience as you would have 20 years ago 😉 and they require very little space for storage.

I tried to find laptops covering the 386 - Pentium III eras with the best possible specs, so they wouldn't behave like really cheap and crappy PCs. I also wanted every laptop to be compatible with DOS and Win 3.1 😉 and I think that I accomplished that.

Every laptop shown here has Sound Blaster compatible sound card, active matrix TFT screen and built-in speakers (T3200 SXC had ISA slots so I added the sound card and glued small speakers inside).

Specifications:

TI Travelmate 4000M (top left) - 486 DX4 75MHz, 20 MB RAM, SCSI port, gameport, CD docking station with stereo speakers (not shown here), soundcard, trackpoint.

Toshiba Libretto 110 (top center) - P1 233 MMX, 64 MB RAM, sound card, trackpoint, very small 😀

Compaq Presario 1800 (top right) - P3 700 MHz, 192 MB RAM, ATI Rage 128 Pro (runs Half-Life smoothly), floppy drive, ESS Solo-1 sound card (compatible with DOS, gameport accessible through port replicator), touchpad.

Siemens Nixdorf PCD-4ND (bottom left) - 486 DX4 75MHz (I also have the 50MHz and 100MHz mainboard), 20MB RAM, ESS sound card with original Yamaha OPL3 chip (some mainboard revisions have just all-in-one ESS sound card), trackball, ISA port (probably) accessible through expansion edge connector (docking station or custom made adapter required).

Toshiba T3200SXC (center) - Intel 386SX 16MHz, coprocessor, CGA and VGA compatibility, 7MB RAM, two ISA slots (added soundcard).

Toshiba Libretto 70 (bottom center) - P1 120 MMX, 32MB RAM, ESS sound card, trackpoint. Both Librettos have port replicators and PCMCIA floppy drive.

Siemens Nixdorf PCD-5ND (bottom right) - P1 90 MHz, 32MB RAM, ESS sound card with original Yamaha OPL3 chip, trackball.

All laptops can run DOS games with sound, even the Presario 1800 with Pentium 3 - I actually managed to install Windows 3.11 on it, with SVGA video driver and sound drivers 😀
Presario 1800 has very good screen scaling algorithm, so it properly scales the DOS resolutions to the 1024x768 screen (with smooth edges), and the other laptops have native capability of displaying 640x480 and 320x200/240 with perfectly sharp pixels. Travelmate, Nixdorf and Presario laptops are expanding 320x200 to 320x240 which is very nice, entire screen is filled.

Oh, and you can also use Orinoco Gold PCMCIA wi-fi card, even on 486 laptops and access the Internet using Dillo for DOS browser or something like that. Also it is very easy to repair the Ni-MH batteries by replacing the old cells.

Well, I think that my laptops are proving that The 8 Bit Guy was wrong in his retro laptops video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k2v7k-wAm2E because he said that no 486 laptops have sound card - well, that's obviosly not true, and also it is perfectly possible to run DOS games with sound even on Pentium 3 laptops, and you can have a higher resolution than 640x480 (i mean Presario 1800) without black borders or terrible scaling, you just need to find the right hardware 😉 so maybe someone looking for old laptops will find this post helpful.