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[win98]

Get the 233mhz it will run windows 98se faster if you need to use it.

[Red Sandwich]

I would be very wary when buying old laptops. Many of the ones which appear on the secondhand market are old corporate ones that have been dusted down, cleaned up and patched up. Such machines have often been given a pretty hard time by their owners. I used to be provided with one of the cheaper Dell laptops and they would usually break after 6 months or so of use.

So I wouldn't buy one without first seeing it and giving it a good going over. Any that look as if they have been patched up (e.g. signs of adhesive or use of tape, boards fixed with solder or pieces of wire, etc.) would be immediate rejects. I would also try twisting the case. If it isn't perfectly rigid that's another instant reject as it means the chassis is broken and that leads to other problems.

Regarding sound, you say if it has stereo output it has a sound card. This is unlikely. The sound hardware is normally built onto the laptop's mainboard or a subsidiary board. That may make finding drivers for it difficult although some manufacturers (e.g. Compaq) are very good at providing DIY on-line support for their old machines.

Similar considerations apply to graphics. It's usually built-in and may not be easily upgradable. Also because they are aimed at the business market many don't do accelerated 3D graphics (or possibly even 3D graphics at all).

On screens, older machines will usually have slow screens and any fast action will blur. Later ones usually have faster screens but I would still check specifications to avoid disappointment.

Lastly laptops are often bad value. You pay a very high price for the portability so that or compactness really has to be of prime importance if you wish to buy a laptop. Unless, of course you can find a really good bargain but I find that most of those good bargains would go into my "instantly reject" category. There is usually a reason for a particularly low price.

[blastradius14]

If you get a laptop for old games and need a windows on it, make sure you have Windows 95 as a starting OS. You can then upgrade to Win98 SE, but I would leave it where it is.

driverguide.com is your friend... you can search for All the drivers of the type you need by operating systems, and they have lots of win95 drivers.

Now, I am not so great with Dos, but I do know there is a way to make it so that the dos will load drivers that you provide for it for soundcards and stuff. Of course, normally these have to be ISA or PCI cards, but if its a ESS audio laptop card it should work. I liked to play tyrian on my last laptop k:


Out of the selection you had, I'd take the first one.

[win98]

Yeah old corperarte laptops usally breack quicker than desktops since they get a hard time.

[Grinder]

Maybe you can find one with a dockingstation, to which you could connect an old random 14" color monitor - if you have one. That's what I would do if I had the money and space to make a perfect laptop setup/station/thingy

[win98]

I agree wth Grinder do it!

[The Chair]

Hi everyone, thank you for all the replies, I got my hands on an old laptop finally. Here's what I got:

Dell Latitude XPi CD P150ST
150mhz
80 edo-ram
2.1gb hd
Video: NeoMagic 2093
Audio: ESS 1888
CD & Floppy drives

(more specific specs at http://support.dell.com/support/edoc...ptcd/Specs.htm )

Now I've had a lot of problems with it, one of the biggest being that I couldn't get sounds to work in 98% of the games, only music, if even that. Only game in which I could get both work was Ultima 7, but I couldn't get the speech to work in that. I suppose this might be somekind of driver issue, I've been battling with this really hard and trying drivers I could find for ES1888.

Another is that the laptop crashes often, but only when doing certain things though, like after setting sound and music for Crusader: No Remorse or No Regret. This is very frustating, I can at least run No Remorse, but there is no sound or music. I really looked forward to get to play these two.

I also can't choose the laptop to boot from a cd, theres no option for cd in the bios. So I tried upgrading bios, which still didn't seem to help, but I got another new and really bad problem instead. The screen has these lines going on it that interfear with the picture, distorting it from where the lines go. This I first saw when I went to BIOS after upgrading it, but I didn't see it in DOS and not in Windows 95 either, unless I moved a window to the left side of the screen, so that it would go out of view, then the problem would appear on whole screen. But then I reformatted again and didn't see the problem, untill I installed the video drivers in Windows 95. After that it's been on all the time. I even reformatted again and now it even happens in DOS all the time. Does anyone know of how to help? Is there any hope? I guess downgrading bios might help, but how to do that? It was even really hard to find updated bios for this machine.


Btw, thanks to blastradius14 for mentioning driverguide, it has helped me a lot.

[The Fifth Horseman]

You should have made a backup copy of your BIOS before you started the update.

But the specs are a complete bullseye - this will be a wonderful DOS machine.

Back to the BIOS... try finding older versions of the BIOS using Google, and try them out. In the worst case, take the machine to a professional who should probably know what to do.

[win98]

Agrees. I only upgrtade my sys bios if I know what I am doing as a matter of fact I only just updated my internet pc's Bios so I could have more features.

[The Chair]

Luckily I was able to find the same bios version I had before, no more of those graphical problems.

Does anyone have suggestions for the other problems I had though? Thanks.