Favorite Old-School Laptops?

[racketboy]

What are your favorite laptops that may be a bit slow by today's standards, but are pretty solid (and maybe even portable) otherwise.

My favorites are the IBM Thinkpad T and X series.
Here's ones I've used:
600X (precursor to the T series) -- this thing is a tank and has possibly the best laptop keyboard I've ever used.
T20
T41 - My wife's current laptop
X21 - my current laptop

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

I had T-30 and T-40 laptops which were second to none, but both suffered from motherboard issues later on.

Currently I use the family desktop (Win XP), but I've still got the old 200mhz Win 98 desktop in my closet for when I get some room to put it somewhere.

I currently don't own any older machines but I'd love to pick up an old Win 98 laptop to use as my day to day/carry around machine.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

IBM Thinkpad 380
IBM Thinkpad T20
IBM Thinkpad T43
Ibook G3 (not clamshell design)

Currently running a wonderful ThinkPad T61 w/ Vista and an NEC Mobile Pro with windows CE 4.2

[Hatta]

Everyone loves Thinkpads. I have a T23, it's a nice stable, well supported machine. I run Linux on it. It serves it's purpose as a portable emulation machine quite well, but in retrospect it's missing a few niceties.

The video chip on this thing, of course, sucks. It does support OpenGL, but I've never gotten a 3d game to work well on it. OpenGL does however work very well for scaling emulators, which is why I bought the machine, so I'm satisfied.

Also, it has USB1.1 and no WiFi. You can get PCMCIA cards for each, but that's extra cost and hassle.

In all, everything up to the 16 bit generation is emulated very well. Even Dosbox runs most protected games well, but it does peg the CPU the whole time. I've tried 2 PSX games on it. Rakugaki Showtime ran pretty well, Metal Gear Solid did not. I haven't had much luck running MGS on epsxe on any machine though.

[otaku]

I like apple machines I suppose don't care much for ibm machines other than the build quality. Dell and micron made some nice machines I've used. Not really into old laptops just the more recent ones I've used lately last 7 years or so

[andymol21]

I'm just setting up an old Powerbook G3 Wallstreet as my guitar amp controller now. I have a Line 6 Flextone III that has midi inputs to control it with Line 6's Edit software. Means I can store any tone I ever make, and instantly recall it with a touch of a button. I might try hooking up some sort of pedal board connected via USB. I love these old Macs, my 233Mhz Wallstreet is running OSX 10.4.11 Tiger with very little slowdown! The operating system is actually almost 9 years younger than the computer it is running on! (Wallstreet: 1998ish, Tiger 10.4.11: 2007)

Wait... This post isn't about retrogaming at all........... SEEEEEEEGAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!

[Hatta]

I really like the IBM laptops for the trackpoint. I'm really no fan of the touch pad. Also, they have a real, physical, 3rd button. That's really nice for X.

[ArwingCmdr]

My favorite is the PowerBook G3 "Pismo". Solid build, hot swappable drives and the ability to have two batteries. Not to mention a nice 15' screen. I still have one as a backup along side my Titanium PowerBook G4 which is my day-to-day machine.

[Mod_Man_Extreme]

I've always wanted a clamshell iBook, but I've never actually seen one in person.

[ArwingCmdr]

I've always wanted a clamshell iBook, but I've never actually seen one in person.

I've had 2. They are nice. The only things I didn't like were low quality sound, 800x600 max resolution and you had to completely dismantle it to get to the hard drive. Reliable as hell though.