asiafish
07-05-2006, 09:10 PM
I used to have a Toshiba Portege 4000 back when it was a new machine (late 2001 if I recall) and sold it about 18 months later for something larger and faster (ThinkPad T22). Well, I just opened a law firm a few months ago and needed a fleet of laptops for temporary hires to use. Since these machines would spend most of their time sitting idle in a drawer, and only come out for days at a time when my workload requires temps, I didn't want the expense of new equipment or to worry about the space requirements of desktops, as these will be used arrayed around my conference table (I bought six of them), hooked up to my wireless network.
The workload dictates Microsoft Word and moderately fast web browsing in Firefox. Only one of the six will ever be used as a true portable, and all will have USB mice attached to overcome the discomfort that any laptop pointing device imposes. So the requirements were that the machines be cheap, small and reliable, which meant either Toshiba Porteges, certain Tecras, Apple iBooks or IBM ThinkPad X or T series. Since Portege 4000s were discontinued about 3 1/2 years ago, there are many of them showing up on the off-lease market at an average price of $250, though I paid $300 for one that was described as "Absolutely Like New", and was not dissappointed.
Four of the machines are very basic, with just a plain vanila CD-ROM drive, 256MB of RAM and no wireless cards. Two of them were higher spec, with one at 384MB of RAM with DVD-ROM and WiFi, the other at 512MB of RAM with DVD-ROM and WiFi. I replaced both WiFi cards and filled all empty MPCI slots with brand new Atheros 5000 cards (802.11 a/b/g) on account of their excellent speed and sensitivity and the difficulty getting the old Toshiba (Agere) cards to authenticate on my 128-bit WEB network. I'll order a single slot-loading DVD-RW drive (Pioneer DVR-K05) to put in the "like new" machine, which is also the highest spec, as well as a new battery. This will be my associate's laptop for business travel, and configured with Windows XP Pro it gives up almost nothing to more modern laptops in terms of functionality and usefulness.
Even by the standards of 2006, these are very attractive laptops. The cases are beautiful silver finish that contrasts nicely with the black interior. The polysilicon screens are still bright by 2006 standards, not measuring up to the latest bright-screen technology, but a lot better than the screen on the 12" PowerBook I just sold. Colors are very bright and vivid, and despite the very weak integrated Trident Cyberblade graphics (16MB from system ram), DVD playback is every bit as good as on my brand-new MacBook (2GHz CoreDUo).
The keyboard is also terrific, far better than the generic keyboards on most modern laptops. IBM and Apple still put a better keyboard on their premium models, but this 5-year-old Toshiba is very close, with a very ThinkPad-like feel to it. The Accupoint mouse is nowhere near as good as the similar device IBM uses, with an imprecise and jumpy motion and mushy buttons, but paired each of these with a nice Microsoft Optical Wheel Mouse, except for the best of them which is paired to an Apple Mighty Mouse (works great on PCs too).
Even with Windows XP SP2 and Office 2003 the computer is more than fast enough for regular office productivity tasks. There is absolutely no difference between this 5-year-old Portege with its low-brow graphics card and "slow" 750MHz processor and the 2GHz MacBook booted natively in Windows. Yes, the new mahines boot into Windows in 20 seconds instead of a minute, and Word launches in 3 instead of 5 seconds, but once in Windows with applications open, there is no appreciable penalty. There are no dropped frames on DVD movies (WinDVD 7), web pages load very quickly and even complexly formatted and long documents have no slow-downs.
Where there would be a massive speed hit is any kind of graphic creation. I wouldn't think of encoding video or doing any heavy Photoshop work on one of these, but for Office productivity they are more than fine. In my office everything is done in Word and a web-based application called LawLogix. For these tasks, these very inexpensive used Porteges are actually far more pleasant to work with than a new entry-level Dell Inspiron, have much better keyboards, smaller though better screens, and most important of all, are likely to be more reliable over the long haul despite their age whatever wear they've suffered.
As for the like-new one, its got a fast 80GB 5400 RPM TravelStar hard drive and soon-to-arrive slot-loading DVD-RW and new battery it will possibly make an even better travel machine than my new MacBook, which weighs almost a pound more and runs 30 minutes shorter on its battery. Another benefit of these older machines is that they really are LAPtops. This thing even under full load barely gets warm, unlike todays machines that can double as stoves (MacBook internal temperatures reach 85C).
I actually like the Portege 4000 better now than I did 4-years-ago when I got my first one.
The workload dictates Microsoft Word and moderately fast web browsing in Firefox. Only one of the six will ever be used as a true portable, and all will have USB mice attached to overcome the discomfort that any laptop pointing device imposes. So the requirements were that the machines be cheap, small and reliable, which meant either Toshiba Porteges, certain Tecras, Apple iBooks or IBM ThinkPad X or T series. Since Portege 4000s were discontinued about 3 1/2 years ago, there are many of them showing up on the off-lease market at an average price of $250, though I paid $300 for one that was described as "Absolutely Like New", and was not dissappointed.
Four of the machines are very basic, with just a plain vanila CD-ROM drive, 256MB of RAM and no wireless cards. Two of them were higher spec, with one at 384MB of RAM with DVD-ROM and WiFi, the other at 512MB of RAM with DVD-ROM and WiFi. I replaced both WiFi cards and filled all empty MPCI slots with brand new Atheros 5000 cards (802.11 a/b/g) on account of their excellent speed and sensitivity and the difficulty getting the old Toshiba (Agere) cards to authenticate on my 128-bit WEB network. I'll order a single slot-loading DVD-RW drive (Pioneer DVR-K05) to put in the "like new" machine, which is also the highest spec, as well as a new battery. This will be my associate's laptop for business travel, and configured with Windows XP Pro it gives up almost nothing to more modern laptops in terms of functionality and usefulness.
Even by the standards of 2006, these are very attractive laptops. The cases are beautiful silver finish that contrasts nicely with the black interior. The polysilicon screens are still bright by 2006 standards, not measuring up to the latest bright-screen technology, but a lot better than the screen on the 12" PowerBook I just sold. Colors are very bright and vivid, and despite the very weak integrated Trident Cyberblade graphics (16MB from system ram), DVD playback is every bit as good as on my brand-new MacBook (2GHz CoreDUo).
The keyboard is also terrific, far better than the generic keyboards on most modern laptops. IBM and Apple still put a better keyboard on their premium models, but this 5-year-old Toshiba is very close, with a very ThinkPad-like feel to it. The Accupoint mouse is nowhere near as good as the similar device IBM uses, with an imprecise and jumpy motion and mushy buttons, but paired each of these with a nice Microsoft Optical Wheel Mouse, except for the best of them which is paired to an Apple Mighty Mouse (works great on PCs too).
Even with Windows XP SP2 and Office 2003 the computer is more than fast enough for regular office productivity tasks. There is absolutely no difference between this 5-year-old Portege with its low-brow graphics card and "slow" 750MHz processor and the 2GHz MacBook booted natively in Windows. Yes, the new mahines boot into Windows in 20 seconds instead of a minute, and Word launches in 3 instead of 5 seconds, but once in Windows with applications open, there is no appreciable penalty. There are no dropped frames on DVD movies (WinDVD 7), web pages load very quickly and even complexly formatted and long documents have no slow-downs.
Where there would be a massive speed hit is any kind of graphic creation. I wouldn't think of encoding video or doing any heavy Photoshop work on one of these, but for Office productivity they are more than fine. In my office everything is done in Word and a web-based application called LawLogix. For these tasks, these very inexpensive used Porteges are actually far more pleasant to work with than a new entry-level Dell Inspiron, have much better keyboards, smaller though better screens, and most important of all, are likely to be more reliable over the long haul despite their age whatever wear they've suffered.
As for the like-new one, its got a fast 80GB 5400 RPM TravelStar hard drive and soon-to-arrive slot-loading DVD-RW and new battery it will possibly make an even better travel machine than my new MacBook, which weighs almost a pound more and runs 30 minutes shorter on its battery. Another benefit of these older machines is that they really are LAPtops. This thing even under full load barely gets warm, unlike todays machines that can double as stoves (MacBook internal temperatures reach 85C).
I actually like the Portege 4000 better now than I did 4-years-ago when I got my first one.