Subnotebook / Ultraportable / Table on the cheap?

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Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 15:09:22 GMT

The Tank, my fusty, creaky, heavy KDS Valiant, is rapidly approaching
obsolesence for much of what I need to do with it these days. The
battery's dead, and I don't feel like spending a hundred bucks on a new
one when battery life pretty much sucked, anyway. I'm on my third AC
adapter, and it's starting to bite the dust. I find myself upgrading the
hard drive every six months, and they aint cheap. I even bought at used
slimline CDRW on Ebay and dremeled down the bezel to get it to fit into
my case.

Basically, the marketing guys make fun of me at work, and it's a giant
pain in the ass haul.

I've got about $1200 to spend, and I'm going to put half of that towards
a relatively sweet (for me) desktop system.

I'd like to put the remainder toward a used sub-3lb notebook that I can
actually carry around with me. Problem is, I don't really know where to
start looking.

After doing some initial poking around, it looks like the Actius MM10
comes pretty close to my absolute minimum requirements. Unfortunately,
you can't upgrade the memory or the disk, but for what I want it for, I
think I can make it work, and they seem to go for 500-600 on Ebay.

Here are my must haves:
* Battery life: 3+ hours actual.
* CPU: 800mhz or better. Doesn't matter whether it's a Transmeta or
whatever; I'm not installing Gentoo.
* Memory: 256MB or more. Preferrably upgradable.
* HDD: 15GB or more. Gotta have an XP partition for work.
* A PCMCIA slot. For my Xircom modem.
* USB 2.0: Two or more ports. I've got external hard and CD drives out
the wazoo.
* Screen: I don't want one of those 1/3 size things like on the old
Picturebooks. 1024 by, uh 600 or something would be fine.

Would be nice:
* USB-bootable.
* Prism or Orinoco wifi. I've had no end of trouble with Realtek cards,
and I'm still a little leery about the state of the Intel drivers for Linux.
* Firewire: I don't really need it at the moment, but who knows?
* Optical drive: At least a CD-RW. If it's just a CD/DVD-ROM, I'd almost
rather do without the extra weight.
* A serial port, so I don't have to keep track of any adapters.

Anybody got any ideas? If I can at least get a list of models, it would
be a big help. I know next to nothing about tablet PCs, but I figure
it's a place to look for my specs, even if I expect to be using it in
clamshell mode 99% of the time.

Really, all I need is a tiny machine that's a couple/three years out of
date, but as you can probably imagine, this kind of thing is kind of
hard to track down on the web.

Muchas gracias.

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