I finally got myself a nice used notebook.
After prowling ebay for weeks, I bought a Toshiba 315CDT, with 32MB, 2 gig HD, active matrix screen, a good battery, and a PC-Card ethernet card & dongle (I always smirk at that word);) on a 200MHz Pentium.
"Shocking!" I hear some of you say. "Why, that lad's bonkers. He said he wanted a Powerbook!"
Yup. and I've got one, sort of. I figured that for the price I would have had to pay for a Powerbook of comparable power and accessories, I could buy the Toshiba, and run Basilisk for my Mac needs. It also seems to run STeem, the Atari ST emu at a fair speed as well, but I haven't had time to fully test that yet.
I had fun tonight confounding my co-workers by switching back and forth between Mac and Windows desktops.
32MB is a little spartan for running Basilisk, so I'm already looking to bump up the memory a bit. Fortunately, it takes standard EDO SODIMMs.
The case is in near-mint condition, but could use some interesting painting here and there. :ebc:
Yes, the dark lords that love powerbooks and use ebay (and seem to have huge, flameing walets! ;)), seem to make the prices of used powerbooks extremly high. Anything g4 and higher seems to never go down in price!
I've run a few benchmarks on the Toshiba from inside Basilisk II.
Benchmarking was done with Norton Utilities 3, with Norton recommended settings (no Appletalk, suggested cache size, etc.)
The regular Win32 version of Basilisk comes in between a IIfx and a Powerbook 170, at 55.8.
The JIT (Just In Time) compiled version of Basilisk comes in between a 6100 and an 840AV at 199!
This is on a 200MHz laptop, with only 32MB ram. On the emulation side, I'm running system 7.5.5)
Unfortunately, the JIT Basilisk is crashy on both my laptop and desktop, so I'll used the slower stable version.
Just as an aside, my desktop PC posts Norton Benchmarks of 487 and a whopping 1478 with the JIT Basilisk - mightily above the PowerMac 8100 Norton rating of 330. I'd be interested to see how Norton 3 rated my G3 running the 68K versino of Norton...I'll have to try it!
I recently acquired from a junk pile an old Toshiba Portege 320CT subnotebook. (32MB RAM, 266Mhz Pentium MMX, and a really funky 1024x600 TFT widescreen display. It now has 96MB, thanks to a "donation" from an older Satellite 445CDX with a horrible passive-matrix screen.)
Being a glutton for punishment, I had to get Basilisk going on it before donating the machine to a poor relative, or something. :^b
Speedometer 4.02 results: (I don't have Norton)
CPU = 2.290
Graf = 1.15
Disk = 4.02
Math = 46.78
PR = 2.05
(Basilisk running "Windowed", dynamic frame rate, JIT enabled, under Slackware 9.1.)
Anyway. Happy motoring. Those old Toshibas are relatively solid, although they tend to be a little quirky when it comes to chipsets. (The USB implimentation in the Pentium Toshibas is... funky. As is PCMCIA. Of course, none of those things will really show when you're running Windows.) ;^>
--Peace
I rilly got a kick out of the fact that USB was even on a laptop of that vintage. Shure enough, my dad's 445 (or something like that, it's a P1 220mhz, IIRC) has a usb port on the back, and I remember seeing in the manual that it was "for future devices" or some such. Ah to be in 1997 again... nothing like usb on the PCMCIA bus!
i have an old toshiba 1755, once again amzingly it has a 4x dvd drive! its 7 or 8 years old now, very solid. i never got basilisk running on it though, only has a 10gb hdd and its full of mp3's, id rather use my PB 1400 anyway