Reply 20 of 29, by swaaye
Around 1997 or so, active matrix screens (what we use now) became much more commonplace and they have decent response times. But they are still considerably slower and have much lower color quality than anything relatively modern. LCDs don't age well, either, as the CFLs for the backlight wear out like any other fluorescent bulb (they tend to yellow).
The older you go, the less likely it'll be active matrix. Those screens were extreme luxury in 486 times. Think of laptops that cost $3000+. If you get a laptop with a dual scan or passive matrix LCD, it will be really slow and make motion blur/smudge.
Another major issue is that old laptops don't have graphics chips that can scale the image remotely well. If you can't run native resolution (probably 800x600 or 1024x768), you will have two options: basic pixel resize (horrible jagged aliasing) or letterboxing. I remember being able to alternate these two with a function key at the time. It may also be a BIOS setting. Proper image scaling arrived around the time of the ATI Rage Mobility (called "ratiometric expansion".)