Sorry to all those reading this posting hoping to see an announcement of a new ultra-low-cost PPC Amiga Laptop. Nothing that exciting. I just want to tell everyone about my fantactic purchase the other week.
Last Friday I came home from work to discover that my neighboor was having a garage sale. I wandered over to look around and found an old laptop there (a Toshiba Satellite Pro 4270ZDVD, for those who want specifics). To summarize, it has a 500MHz Celeron, 15inch screen, DVD-ROM, 11GB HD, and 64Megs of RAM, floppy drive, and USB. Certainly not top-of-the-line but when the lady told me she only wanted $20 for it (including a nice carrying case), I couldn't refuse.
However, I got an even bigger surprise when I took it home and started playing with it. Just for kicks, I threw in my Amithlon CD, not expecting much to happen to be honest. At first it looked like the computer stalled at boot and I was about to give up, but then my kids distracted me and I inadvertantly left the computer running. When I came back, to my surprise, a tiny 640x480, 8bit working was waiting for me.
It took some time, downloading updated Kernals and patches, but now I have a 1024x768 24bit Workbench running on this thing. The 64Megs is a little tight; Amithlon only leaves about 16Megs for the Amiga, so I'm planning on buying another 128Megs. But for an Amiga, even 16Megs is quite usable.
I have had a few problems though. I can't seam to get the sound to work (it uses some sort of Yamaha chip and it appears there is not support for it with AHI). Also, the clock ticks too slowly. Anybody know what might be cauing this to happen? It's only happens in Amithlon; after ~1hr of use, the system clock is ~10min behind. When the laptop is running WindowsXP this does not happen.
However, probably the biggest annoyance it that the keyboard only has one "Windows" key which appears to be mapped to the LEFT Amiga key. This makes rebooting difficult and most keyboard shortcuts impossible. Is there some program out there that will allow me to map one of the keys the Amiga doesn't use (like F12) to the RIGHT Amiga key?
Anyway, despite the lack of sound and the few minor annoyances, it works great for most things I use it for (like writing, FinalWriter97 runs beautifully on this thing, even with only 16Megs of ram). I've always wanted an Amiga Laptop but would never have guessed I would be able to get one for only $20!!!
Best $20 I've ever spent! :-D