Upgrading A Laptop Costs Just $150
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday May 13, 1990
EVER since Radio Shack first launched its Model 100 laptop machine in the mid-1980s, portable computing has been a reality for the serious computer user.
The Tandy Model 100, with its eight-line by 40-column screen and limited 32K memory, wasn't PC-compatible, of course, but it beat the then portable PCs, with their cumbersome cathode ray screens and heavy workings, into a cocked hat.
It wasn't until a couple of years ago, however, that portable PCs -machines with full-sized keyboards, liquid crystal display (LCD) screens and PC compatibility - began to appear in less than lap-sagging weights.
The arch-exponent of the portable PC world in Europe and the US is Toshiba. With a wide variety of machines, ranging from the 2.2kg T1000SE to the heavyweight T5200 gas plasma portable, Toshiba has a portable for most user applications.
Toshiba's main problem, however - common to all laptop manufacturers - has been to squeeze as much technology as possible into a lightweight box.
Only a year ago, it simply wasn't possible to get a back-lit LCD screen, hard disk and floppy disk, into a sensibly priced battery-driven box with 640K of Ram and a keyboard without compromising somewhere.
Toshiba's competitors have been innovative in their approach to the problem. Compaq, for example, pushed the price sky-high as well as stretching the term laptop to its limits to achieve a portable machine with all the above requisites.
NEC, meanwhile, settled for ditching both disk formats in favour of a CMOS Ram-based "silicon" drive. The result was the Ultralite which suffers from the twin problems of high pricing and difficulty in loading programs into its memory.
Zenith took the novel approach of developing a two-inch disk drive that crammed an incredible 720K onto a disk surface no larger than a postage stamp.
The times they are a-changing, however, and a new generation of laptop PCs is beginning to appear. While it's still almost impossible to squeeze all the ideal shopping list of features into a truly battery-powered portable at a sensible price, Psion and Zenith are exploring an interesting solution - leave out the floppy disk.
Psion's PC600 laptop PC, which has been out for about a month in the UK and is set for export to other countries, has all the qualities users are looking for: standard Ram, readable LCD screen, hard drive and a good price. But no floppy drive.
Psion's solution is the same as the soon-to-be-announced Zenith Minisport Mark 2, that of leaving out the floppy drive to save on weight, battery power and, perhaps more importantly, space, and replacing it with a file transfer utility.
Both Psion and Zenith have opted to include a copy of Traveling Software's Laplink III package within Rom on the machine. Laplink III allows files to be transferred at very high speed over a serial or parallel cable. Furthermore, unlike the vast range of competing file transfer utility packages, Laplink III does not have to be present on the portable and the secondary machine.
Laplink III actually includes a set of utilities that, upon sensing another computer connected via a serial or parallel link, pushes a header program down the link. Then, after a few key depressions on the secondary machine, which is usually a desktop PC, begins a rapid clone process. Within a minute, a copy version of Laplink III appears on the disk of the secondary machine.
A neat process, and also one that means that Laplink III users need only carry a copy of the program around for their own machine, rather than for the secondary machine as well. In the case of the Psion MC600 and the soon to be announced Zenith Minisport mark 2, since Laplink III is in Rom, there is no need even to worry about carrying a copy of the program around at all - it's built into the machine.
But what about those of us who are stuck with an existing portable PC without a hard disk? Limited to just 720K on a 3.5-inch disk or, worse still, 360K on a 5.25-inch drive, there isn't much alternative to carrying around a box of disks with you, is there?
As a user of an aging but trusty Toshiba T1000, the forerunner to the new Toshiba T1000SE machine, I noticed that the latter had a high density 3.5-inch floppy drive capable of storing up to 1.44Mb on a single floppy disk. I also noticed that the T1000SE's drive is the same size as the drive in my T1000.
So I bought a 1.44Mb drive for $US150, undid the machine's screws, and replaced the drive in my Toshiba T1000. The result? A revitalised machine, with double the disk drive capacity.
High-density 3.5-inch drives are available in a variety of case sizes and weights. They all come with mounting plates to allow them to replace most other 3.5- or 5.25-inch drives.
Doubling the capacity of my Toshiba T1000's disk drive now means that I can fit a complete copy of Wordstar, including a full spellchecker and thesaurus, onto a single disk, yet still leave room for several thousand words as well.
I can also fit a copy of my favourite spreadsheet package onto another floppy disk. Add a communications program and several utilities (including, of course, Laplink III) and I now only need three 3.5-inch disks where more than twice as many were required previously.
The result is that my Toshiba T1000 is revitalised.
I've also saved the cost of upgrading to a hard disk laptop. That's good value for US$150, wouldn't you say?
© 1990 Sydney Morning Herald