declan@romulus.rutgers.edu (Declan McCullagh/LZ) (04/24/91)
I posted this last week: >Now, the system that comes closest to that is the TI Travelmate 2000, >a 286/1 MB RAM/20 MB HD/4.4 lb system, with a very small footprint (a >nearly identical one is available from Sharp). List is $3,999; I can >get it from a local mail order house for about $1,900. Unfortunately, >it doesn't come with a floppy, but in my case, it's not that >important. >I'm going to be using it to take notes in class, as a computer to take >on the road, and as a terminal for my NeXT. Needless to say, it has >to be extremely quiet and hopefully rather light for it to be as >usable as I'd like it to be. >I'm planning on getting a system in the next few days, and I'll let >you know which model I get and how it turns out. Well, I got some responses, most of which either pointed me towards the Sharp/TI unit or advised me to get a 386SX model (lots of happy ZEOS 386 owners out there, I'd imagine). Thanks to those who replied! (and apologies for the epic length of this post) Ultimately, I decided on the TI Travelmate 2000 unit. It was about $1,900 from a local mail order house here in NJ. Add in the carrying case (genuine Texas Instruments leatherette) at $88, and sales tax, and it came to a little over $2,100. FYI, I got it from Computer Options Unlimited in Bound Brook, NJ - 800-424-7678. Tell them I sent you; who knows, maybe you'll get a better deal... Before I went to pick it up, I spent about an hour filling up some 3.5" disks with some software that I thought would be nice to have on the machine initally. What kind of things? Stuff from the labs around campus, mostly. ProComm, too, so I could get the thing hooked up as a terminal. I set up the machine in the store, used their external 3.5" floppy drive to copy the applications onto the HD, and took it home. Now, I've never had an MS-DOS machine before, and probably spent a total of two hours in my life playing with them before I started to go laptop-shopping. I set up some of the utilities I copied onto the HD, and spent a pleasant few hours playing around with the unit and learning what MS-DOS was all about. After I had a working knowledge of the system, I headed to the computer lab with a blank optical disk in hand to see what kind of Shareware/PD software is out there. Fortunately, I was in luck, and was able to find a couple of good FTP sites. I spent an hour or two FTPing about 60 MB of MS-DOS software onto the OD and headed back to the dorm room to test it out. In order to hook the TI laptop up to the NeXT, I was actually able to use the custom cable included with the unit (female DB-9 to female DB-25/DB-9) with my modem cable (mini DIN-8 to DB-25). Spawned a getty, ran ProComm, and downloaded some of the more promising software onto the HD. In my quest for a UNIX-lookalike environment for the TI, I spent a few hours looking through the various shells and UNIX commands that I found. I finally decided to use a shareware CSHELL program (a $25 reg. fee), and the GNUish MS-DOS utilities: cat, cmp, cp, cut, dd, diff, fgrep, find, grep, head, indent, ls, mkdir, mv, paste, rm, sed, sort, tail, touch. Add in some various utilities (cal, compress, df, du, man, od, pwd, tee, uudecode, wc, and freemacs) from the 'net, and I was all set. A "UNIX environment" on a notebook! $-) In the course of doing this, I did manage to delete some rather necessary files from the root directory, and the machine refused to boot. I tore the plastic off of one of the manuals and figured out how to get it to boot off the ROM disk. A ROM disk can come in handy sometimes... (I still haven't opened the MS-DOS manual, and hope I don't have to) The power-saving features seemed adequate: adjustable HD motor power-off, display timeout, CPU timeout. The VGA screen seemed decent, but most GIF viewers don't seem to nicely dither an 8-bit image down to a 4-bit display (I guess I've been spoiled by Display PostScript). The battery life seems to be a little over two hours with light HD access. The keys are nice and quiet, though the space bar is a bit louder than I'd like. In summary, I've been pleased with the support I've received from the dealer and the performance and (especially!) size and weight of the laptop. If you're going to do more than take notes, mime a UNIX shell, and run some telecommunications software, you may want something faster (and heavier), but the TI Travelmate 2000 is fine for me... Now, I lent the machine to a friend today and he managed to do something nasty to the HD, and the computer won't recognize it. He swears he doesn't know what he did, but I think he dropped it while the HD was spinning. I'm off to the Computer Options Unlimited place tomorrow to see what they say... -Declan