WOW!!! $20 Amiga Laptop... what a deal!!!

[mpiva]

   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

[mpiva]

@ coldfish

64Megs is the BARE MINIMUM for XP and, yes, its slow but still usable.  However it's always such a relief when I shut down Windows and run Amithlon.  SOOOO much faster.  I have WinUAE on there as well for old, chipset dependant stuff, but for productivity, you can't beat Amithlon's boot time.

  If I were to try and do some quick work on Windows during my coffee breaks at work, most of the time would be waisted waiting for Windows to boot and shut down (especially if I had to load up WinUAE after).  With Amithlon, I can be working in FinalWriter in less than a minute, write right up until the very last second, flick the switch to turn it off and get back to my "real" job.

I tried installing Mandriva at one point.  I'm not sure if I did something wrong but it ran worse than Windows.  Also, an 11GB harddrive was getting kind of small for three OS's.  Once I learned how to dual-boot Windows and Amithlon without Linux, I tossed any plans of having a Linux system out the window.  Now I just have Amithlon for most things, and Windows for the few programs/games that I can't use my Amiga for.

@people suggesting AROS

I'm definately going to have to try out an AROS-Live CD but I don't think I'll install it permanently for a few reasons.  As I said above, 11GB is getting kind of small for three OS's; due to the "beta" nature of AROS, I would worry about my harddrive accidentally getting corrupted and loosing all my prescious data (I'd want AROS to be running on it's own harddrive to be safe), and most importantly... FinalWriter doesn't run on AROS (nor TurboCalc, nor MapleV, nor most of the programs I actually want to USE an Amiga laptop for).

BTW, one of the BEST things about having a laptop Amiga is now I can finally show it off to all my friends who have said, "Amiga?  What's that, some kind of Mac?"  :roll:

P.S. - I'm still hoping someone can suggest a program to map my Right Amiga key to one of the keys the Amiga doesn't use (or does nothing like that exist?)