perry@key.COM (Perry The Cynic) (03/01/90)
Seeing how I recently posted a somewhat detailed description of the T1000SE (and thanks for the flowers everybody, I *like* praise), I guess Truth In Advertising compells me to tell you that I'm not after all buying one. It probably won't surprise you tremendously to hear that I'm getting a T1000XE instead. This is remote diagnosis: I've never seen one (I guess nobody has so far :-). What I know (from talking to Toshiba) is this: The T1000XE is a T1000SE, with the 1.4MB floppy drive replaced by a 20MB, 25ms harddrive. Everything else is the same (so refer to my previous article if you like). In particular, the thingie is supposed to weigh substantially the same (a couple of ounces up, maybe), has the same chassis, keyboard, display, and expansion options. Presumably, anything you can stick into, or onto, a T1000SE will also work with the XE, and vice versa. Look and feel should be identical (though response times hopefully will not :-). The XE has the same ROM C: drive with DOS 3.3 in it. It also has LapLink software in ROM, and comes with the classical multiheaded LapLink serial cable (if the other machine has a serial port at all, chances are you can transfer to/from it). Disadvantages? Well, the XE doesn't have a floppy drive. You can buy an external 3.5" floppy drive if you want. Toshiba claims that battery life doesn't suffer from the harddrive, but I'm not quite sure I believe that (buy one more battery :-). If your main way of transferring data is through floppies, you may have a problem. If your source has a serial port, a LapLink transfer will do nicely though. If you habitually STORE data on floppies, the XE is probably not for you. (And BTW, welcome to the nineties.) Toshiba's quoted delivery is "sometimes in March". In Real Life, that probably translates to "end of April to middle of May", unless they have unexpected trouble. Of course, it's substantially the same as the SE, so we can hope that they don't run into serious design trouble. Personally, I've made a deal with my favorite dealer to take an SE until they get the XE in (thanks Alex). Why did I switch? Mainly because I know the difference between 25ms and 94ms, and because 20MB online at a time beats 2MB. I am not (and never was) a floppy kind of person, and not having to carry around reams of floppies makes the box more self-contained. Does that mean that everybody should rather get an XE? Not necessarily. It depends on what you want to run on it. If you have one application that you need to run (say, a particular word processor), and your data isn't too excessively large (a safe bet for text, probable for spreadsheets), the SE is just fine; once everything is in RAM, you don't need to worry about disk speed. If you contemplate buying the expansion box (and guess how much they'll charge for THAT :-/), buying the SE will give you more flexibility. (For me, expansion boxes are out - I want a laptop to carry it around EASILY. If I want a desktop computer, I buy a desktop computer. $1200 buys you a reasonably equipped 12MHz AT with color monitor.) Note that by current prices, the difference between the XE and the SE is slightly higher than the street price for the 1MB RAM upgrade. If you were contemplating to buy the RAM upgrade for a RAM disk to store applications and data into, the XE may be the better buy. (From my experience, the performance difference between a RAM disk and a fast harddrive is smaller than you would believe.) Anyway, I thought I'll give you this update. Now if Toshiba announces another version next week, I'll start tearing my hair out in earnest :-). -- perry -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Perry The Cynic (Peter Kiehtreiber) perry@arkon.key.com ** What good signature isn't taken yet? ** ...!pacbell!key!perry
yuan@uhccux.uhcc.hawaii.edu (Yuan 'Hacker' Chang) (03/04/90)
In article <1489@key.COM> perry@arkon.key.COM (Perry The Cynic) writes:
-
-Why did I switch? Mainly because I know the difference between 25ms and 94ms,
-and because 20MB online at a time beats 2MB. I am not (and never was) a
-floppy kind of person, and not having to carry around reams of floppies
-makes the box more self-contained.
I'd love to see the actual response time of the harddisk on the
T1000XE. I recall reading somewhere that Toshiba designed their harddisks
to spin at ~2400 rpm to conserve battery power (this is the T1600, I
believe).
--
Yuan Chang "What can go wrong, did"
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