First post, by ibm5155
It's been a while since I got this laptop and I will say a resume on why I am in love with i:
- 3 PCMCIA slots (not 1 nor 2, 3!)
- Can boot from pcmcia cards.
- comes with an external Floppy Disk drive plugged to the Parallel Port.
- ESS ES1879 audio chip (FM Synth, good support for MS-DOS, has VxD and WDM drivers)
- CT65555 GPU
- 1 USB 1.1
- Most games works in FullScreen (using all the areas from the Screen instead of leaving some unused space on the screen)
- Quite compact (8 Inches I believe but bigger than Libretto)
- Pentium MMX 233MHz (there's a version with 260MHz)
- Ram can be expanded up to 192MB or 128MB if I recall (mine has 96MB)
- Comes with camera batteries (with that said you can find new batteries for it)
- External CMOS Battery
- You can open the bios while the OS is running without any additional software (also there're some bundled tools that work the same way where they show you the remaining battery or the performance level).
- You can underclock it on the fly
- TFT screen 800x600
But not everything is perfect:
- Japanese Keyboard (Usable but I'm not sure how to use the windows key since the keyboard doesn't have one)
- No Cooler (it seems to run ok without one but it surely gets warmer compared to a Toshiba Satellite 330CDT so an external cooler base is ideal if used for games)
- If you plan to replace the Hard Disk you'll need to remove the entire motherboard .
- Japanese BIOS
- Comes with DOS/V (So compatibility with MS-DOS games may not be the best)
Scores on Speed sys (Maximum performance | speedsys score)
12% | 20.96 ( similar to a Intel i486DX2 25MHz)
25% | 42.32
45% | 63.81
50% | 86.22
75% | 128.11
85% | 149.56
100%|171.51
Quake 2 demo1.dm2 at 320x200 ( 17FPS, 15 with the WDM Audio driver)
About the IO:
- Serial, Parallel Port, VGA, Audio In/Out, USB, Infrared, 3 PCMCIA slots, 1 PS2 port for mouse/keyboard
I'd say it's a great laptop if your goal is to play old games and not use a lot of space, I am still testing it so please let me know if you want to know if any specific game will run on it.