Recently I bought a Toshiba Satellite 320CDT and after playing around with it I consider it pretty much the perfect DOS-machine for me.
The specs are:
- Pentium MMX 233, 32 MB, VGA 2MB, SB-Pro compatible sound with Yamaha OPL3
- Serial, parallel, USB, PS2, Infra-Red
- Headphone/Mic/LineIn-jacks with volume dial
- Built-in 3.5" floppy, 20x CD-ROM, 2xPCMCIA
- 12.1" active matrix TFT screen with 800x600. Video output can be configured to stretch to full screen which I like better than black borders.
Overall build quality and keyboard seem totally fine to me.
The USB port makes it easy to transfer files simply by using a Dual-boot Windows 98. All drivers can still be found on the Dynabook-website.
One really great feature that makes it perfect for DOS is that one can configure L1/L2-caches in the BIOS and even underclock the CPU to half the speed! Thus it can be slowed down to a (slow) 386. I doubt that's possible on many notebooks.
Here are the 3DBench-results for different cache/clock-settings:
7, 14, 47.4, 49.8, 63.2, 65.6, 92, 96.6, 121.3, 126,7
So this covers approximately a 386/16, 386/33, 486/66, P60, P90 and P133
And I've never seen such a fast POST. With an SD-card-adapter it takes 3 seconds to the DOS boot-menu after switching it on. After a soft reset it's only 1 second.
Things that could be improved are:
- Memory speed of the graphics-card (ca. 17MB/sec - although even that might be considered a good thing)
- HD-controller seems to support only disks up to 8 GB
- Even if the memory can be expanded to 160 MB, it's hard to find 144Pin-EDO-SODIMMs. For DOS that doesn't matter but would be nice for Windows. But 32 MB is enough for using Windows to transfer files via USB.
- Of course the screen can't compete with modern displays (low contrast and brightness) but I think it's good for the era.
- The laptop is quite thick and heavy (5.4cm, 3kg) but that's the price of the internal floppy and CD-ROM.
Disclaimer: This is my first impression after two days 😀