Laptops :: Best old laptop to buy for DSL



Thanks for all the input. I guess what I mean to say was that I wanted to pick a laptop where ALL the hardware inside it was supported, including the modem. I know that most manufacturers use winmodems nowadays, but didn't manufacturers used to put hardware modems inside laptops?

All great suggestions by the way please keep the comments coming.

wetterau: How much do the replacement batteries cost?
no laptops for sale at www.betros.com they are "closed for the summer" ???

I will look around for them on eBay. However, I would like a model with an internal modem that that DSL supports.
You have to get pretty ancient to get standard "hayes compatible" built-in modems. You'll probably lose USB (and I'll be surprised if you can get a PCMCIA to USB card to plug-and-play with DSL) and you'll likely be stuck with old 16-bit PCMCIA (no CardBus which eliminates many wired and wireless ethernet cards). You'll also be severly limiting you max RAM which (contrary to popular belief) is far more important to performance than CPU speed.

As for the 600e, DSL actually *does* include a driver (originally open sourced by IBM) for the built-in MWave modem in the 600e. I've loaded the driver without errors but I've never been able to test it (no landline -- just broadband and cell phones) so I have no idea if it really works or how much manual configuration is necessary. Perhaps someone else has tried it?

Another plus of the 600e is that power management actually works! If you first eject any PCMCIA cards, the sleep, suspend, and hibernate to disk functions work flawlessly with DSL. I even have a thinkpad.dsl extension that lets you control many of the power management settings in the BIOS without the need to boot Windows or DOS (however it doesn't have a nice graphical interface). Batteries (I just replaced mine) can be had on EBay for under $30 (retail they're around $100) and running "toram" with a wifi card and surfing the net I can easily get three hours of battery life.
sounds good kopsis, I am sold on the 600e so far. How does the install go?

Does the install probe your video card and configure X windows for you? Are in booted directly into FluxBox?
and does it automatically install everything other than the internal modem? Kopis WHAT 600e do you have?
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