I love the way the screen is so big that it bulges past the base. Talk about a design you just don't see anymore.

I have a Latitude CPx with almost identical specs, except with a 14" screen, and yeah, it's a nice little machine. You can also upgrade the CPU in them, they take MMC2 cards, which can be had in speeds up to 850mhz (though the highest speed ones are fairly rare). I upgraded mine with a 650mhz card.

If you want to upgrade the HD, you can put up to an 80GB in there... the chipset itself supports up to 128GB, but there's some sort of BIOS limitation at play as well which leaves you stuck with lower capacities. 80GB is still quite a big drive for a machine like that, though.

All I really want is more RAM and probably a newer hard drive that's at least 30 GB or so. The current HDD is a somewhat whiny ball bearing design and I like to junk those these days.

The rest is fine. I actually had a notebook earlier that was a 1 GHz Coppermine with the same graphics and audio. I gave that one away to a kid. The screen on this beast is so great though. It's a shame that the majority of notebooks today have such a sad vertical resolution, especially with the 16:9 nonsense.

I was thinking today how 10 years ago notebooks were so expensive and rather rare that they were really sought after. Now I have a growing collection of them and people are giving rather nice machines away for free. They have definitely reached commodity status.

The current HDD is a somewhat whiny ball bearing design

Ah, yeah, I forgot about that... those old Travelstars are annoying as hell. They're even better when they start making the grinding noise. Interestingly, unlike the Deathstars, they usually seem to keep working just fine, despite the awful noises they make.

I just got my hands on a old IBM 60GXP. It has some of the loudest bearings I've ever heard. It's horrible. 😁

I'm sure it has something to do with being 8 years old or so.

How's the screen?

Being 10 years old or so, it does have some mild yellowing. Whites are very slightly shifted towards yellow but it is not really bad at all and I have seen worse. The screen is definitely the highlight of the machine. 😀 There are no obvious dead pixels. No scratches.

swaaye wrote:

[*]ATI Rage Mobility-P w/ 8MB SGRAM (removable "VGA Card" !)

Say again? You mean you can replace it with, say, GeForce 2?

heh heh no. 😀 But the video hardware is separate from the mobo and is removable. It says "VGA Card" on it. I doubt that there was anything made besides Rage Mobility boards though.

Oh. Just when I start fantasizing...

i did my toshiba up with 98se and wifi. it will only max out at 384 mb of ram and is also limit with a measly 8mb gfx ram. will still play games like shadow warrior and wild metal country.