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Best 486 laptop?

Kaypro said:
That Canon Notebook is pretty neat, I've never seen anything like it before (well, except for maybe the IBM 5140 with attached printer...but that has half the cool factor this thing does :D)

My Favourite 486 laptop so far is probably the AST Advantage! 486SX/25. Not too fast, and the Display isn't great. But it has a good feel to it (and a Trackball!). I've never gone wrong with any of the AST Notebooks I've had.
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Since you've brought up the point of a trackball, does anyone have any experience owning/using an AT&T Globalyst laptop? I remember the ones with the trackball on the front edge (vs on the wristpad area). They always appealed to me.

I think I saw a DX4/100 version of it and another one a Pentium 75mhz on eBay just recently.
 
I ended up getting a Micron TransPort Trek 2. It only cost about $30 with shipping, but it didn't include a hard drive (ATA-33), which come to find out, will cost 2-3 times as much as the computer itself, so I'm probably going to end up with buyers' remorse after this. Will an ATA-66 or ATA-100 disk work with an ATA-33 controller?

I also saw the NoteJet on eBay while browsing 486 laptops and decided to pick it up for a project later on. :D

I'll definitely keep an eye out for one of those ThinkPad 755CD's. I was hoping I could find a 486 laptop with a CD-ROM drive.
 
Tiberian Fiend said:
I ended up getting a Micron TransPort Trek 2. It only cost about $30 with shipping, but it didn't include a hard drive (ATA-33), which come to find out, will cost 2-3 times as much as the computer itself, so I'm probably going to end up with buyers' remorse after this. Will an ATA-66 or ATA-100 disk work with an ATA-33 controller?

I also saw the NoteJet on eBay while browsing 486 laptops and decided to pick it up for a project later on. :D

I'll definitely keep an eye out for one of those ThinkPad 755CD's. I was hoping I could find a 486 laptop with a CD-ROM drive.
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Is it a 3.5" ATA-33, or 2.5"?

3.5" ATA66/100 drives should work on ATA33 interfaces (they're backwards compatible).

If the BIOS supports LBA mode, you can use pretty much any 540mb+ drives (I think up through like 40gb), but some early OS's won't recognize partitions larger than 4gb (some even 2gb), so keep that in mind).

You should be able to pick a 1 ~ 4gb drive for less than 10 bucks, including shipping.
 
Go with Win98SE. Does a vastly superior job on the low end. Just make sure to avoid buggy software or you will be doing the 3 hour reboot like I had to do. My fave application had a bad memory leak that they never seemed to fix. So, it was reboot time after around 2 or 3 hours of use.
 
Yep, he better buy it fast!! Before I do. Note the Buy It Now is the same as the starting bid. Those are always my faves. Give you 20 minutes from now.

EDIT: Nevermind!! I see that there are tons available at that Buy It Now price. I will just pick another one.

EDIT2: We should be worried!! The checkout system done by the Hong Kong sellers is excellent!! Does appear to be close to a One World Order already, especially in Internet Land.
 
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EddieDX4 said:
Here's an idea...

http://cgi.ebay.com/2-5-Hard-Disk-D...4|66:2|65:12|39:1|240:1318|301:1|293:1|294:50
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Forgive my ignorance, but doesn't flash memory wear out faster than a hard disk?

chuckcmagee said:
Go with Win98SE. Does a vastly superior job on the low end. Just make sure to avoid buggy software or you will be doing the 3 hour reboot like I had to do. My fave application had a bad memory leak that they never seemed to fix. So, it was reboot time after around 2 or 3 hours of use.
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My biggest problem with Win98SE was that I had to re-install it every six months or so because it gradually degenerated into instability.
 
Tiberian Fiend said:
Forgive my ignorance, but doesn't flash memory wear out faster than a hard disk?
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Get a microdrive. Solve all your problems.

OR

Look at it this way... For the cost of an ATA 2.5gb drive that would work with your laptop (e.g. an old one), you could get the adapter + a couple of 1gb ~ 4gb compact flash cards.

Your non-sequential reads will also be much faster with compact flash. :)
 
My NoteJet 486 was delivered today. I must say, it's in awfully good physical condition for its age. One of the screen latches is broken, and it has the sort of smooth-scraping that occurs on dull-rough surfaces, but other than that, all its doors, covers, and even feet are intact. I'll have to wait until I can get an AC adapter before I can make a full assessment, though.
 
1994 IBM Thinkpad 755CD

It was $8000 brand new, was the first model with a CD-ROM in it, and was capable of running darned near everything from CP/M to Windows 2000 Pro under a 75 or 100 MHz 486 processor (later upgraded to a bus-castrated Pentium 75)
 
Tiberian Fiend said:
Would a 755CD run Win98?
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The official Microsoft requirements for Windows 98 are a 486DX2-66 and 16 MB RAM. In reality, it will run on any 486 CPU if you bypass the speed check during setup, and it is highly recommended to max out your RAM.

I wouldn't recommend it on the 486SLC-series CPUs which IBM used on many of their 486 ThinkPads, though, as the SLC maxes out at 16 MB RAM. Even with Windows 95, that means you'd be constantly swapping virtual RAM to and from the hard drive. A 486SLC-based laptop is therefore (for better or worse) really at best a Windows 3.1x machine.
 
vwestlife said:
The official Microsoft requirements for Windows 98 are a 486DX2-66 and 16 MB RAM. In reality, it will run on any 486 CPU if you bypass the speed check during setup, and it is highly recommended to max out your RAM.
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I tried it on my 486DX4-100 back in the day, and it took 15 minutes to load, so I assumed it was impossible. I guess now I know I didn't have enough RAM. Actually, I pulled a different 486DX4-100 out of my closet today and tried Win98 on it, but it only has 8 megs in it, so it's not running properly. I've forgotten the terminology used for RAM back then... there are two sockets next to the eight rows of the SIMMs... what were they called? 72-pin EDO? How much memory can I stuff into an Am486Dx4-S system?
 
If you really want to cut down on the memory usage of Windows 98, get 98Lite using its "Sleek" configuration. 98Lite allows you to install 98 using the original Windows 95 Explorer, which eliminates the need to load Internet Explorer every time you just want to go to "My Computer" and browse a directory. You can even remove all traces of IE if you wish.
 
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