pollack@dendrite.cis.ohio-state.edu (Jordan B Pollack) (09/19/90)
Ordered for a colleague, I've been working with this toy for a few days. It is really sad that my beloved 11 lb. zenith 286e seems like such a heavy antique. It really is only 4 pounds and is a completely functional 80286 machine, with beautiful VGA LCD display and hard disk, and 2 hour battery. For an additional 1 or 2 pounds (I think), one can add 3 more hours of external battery. IMO, this item leaves the current competition in the dust. Other light machines (LTE/286, 1200XE) still have CGA displays, while other VGA systems (286e, SLT/286) are at least 10 pounds. I would expect both Toshiba and Compaq to rapidly respond. Such an weight/performance advance requires tradeoffs, which can put off some customers. How did TI do it? 1) very light plastic throughout, and obviously fragile; it should travel in a foam-padded hardshell case, rather than loose in a briefcase or in a soft attache. The various auxiliary connectors are covered with click-on covers which are going to break and/or get lost. Our battery arrived with its 3-pin plastic connector damaged in transit. 2) Weak Keyboard. not ergonomically slanted. not full depth of travel, and the function keys (as well as critical ESC and DEL) are full-width but only half-height. 3) Non-Standard connectors. Other than the 9-pin rs232 port, new ultra-small connectors are used. The parallel port comes with a sturdy converter to a DB25. 4) the modem and the external VGA monitor port share a slide-in slot and thus cannot be used simultaneously. 5) The hardware setup memory gets lost when the battery is disconnected. A program called SETCMOS is provided to save and restore this information. Also provided are laplink and battery and palette tools. 6) The Floppy is external; we have not received ours to see how hard is the hookup. Overall, not bad tradeoffs for the weight loss. The question is will Compaq retrofit a VGA display into its lte/286? A lovely toy with up to 3M memory which runs windows 3.0 and other graphics programs quite nicely. However, the 20M disk will fill up quite fast with Microsoft's new (CD-anticipating) unconstrained- diskspace-policy. -- Jordan Pollack Assistant Professor CIS Dept/OSU Laboratory for AI Research 2036 Neil Ave Email: pollack@cis.ohio-state.edu Columbus, OH 43210 Fax/Phone: (614) 292-4890