Toshiba t6600c - 1993 laptop
T6600C literature.
My neighbours has been given one for their son to play on. To say I'm jealous would be an understatement. It is in full working order, 8MB of RAM and roughly 500 MB of HDD space. Windows 95 is installed but I didn't have a chance to use scan disk to check for any HDD problems.
I've asked them to look after it because the mother said it occasionally locks up and she "fixes" it by pulling the plug. *cries* I've shown what to do in future.
I've looked on Ebay and only found one for sale in the US. It went for $200. Is that a fair price for this item? I don't want to see this machine wrecked and if I tell them how much it's worth then hopefully they'll look after it.
My neighbours has been given one for their son to play on. To say I'm jealous would be an understatement. It is in full working order, 8MB of RAM and roughly 500 MB of HDD space. Windows 95 is installed but I didn't have a chance to use scan disk to check for any HDD problems.
I've asked them to look after it because the mother said it occasionally locks up and she "fixes" it by pulling the plug. *cries* I've shown what to do in future.
I've looked on Ebay and only found one for sale in the US. It went for $200. Is that a fair price for this item? I don't want to see this machine wrecked and if I tell them how much it's worth then hopefully they'll look after it.
Post edited by Who? on
Comments
An 8MB laptop with 256 colour display is very low spec. by today's standards. Fair enough, it's good enough for DOS emulators and stuff, and if the person using it is happy then that's great, but you can get far more powerful machines nowadays for a reasonably small sum. And running Windows on an 8MB machine? That'll be so slow.
If you're serious about getting a laptop, then you can buy reconditioned laptops very cheaply. My second laptop was an IBM T20 Thinkpad, and it was great. It even played Unreal Tournament! My current (third) laptop is a Compaq Evo, which isn't nearly as good (well, it's a lot higher spec. wise, but the build quality isn't nearly as good as the Thinkpad (the case, speakers, screen and keyboard were much better on the T20 Thinkpad), and next time round I'm going to look carefully at the Thinkpad range again. Both of these laptops were bought off the 'net, reconditioned, and have been great, with no problems (except would you believe the cat broke my Thinkpad by knocking it off the table? How cliched is that?).
If you want to ask about where to buy a reconditioned Thinkpad, or anything else about them, try:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/
I never found a Compaq Evo forum that was any good - telling, perhaps...
Or you could try your local papers, but you should really check the reviews and prices lists on the 'net, to make sure you don't pay too much for something substandard. Best of luck mate.
I can understand people enjoying retro computers from the 80's to play games on them etc but old old laptops i dont see the point of ?!?
It was running Win 95 and was much faster than I ever imagined it would be concidering the specs. The display was crystal clear and, while I was using it at least, ran remarkably smoothly.
I don't know what it's attraction is but I do know that I liked it. It has far more "character" (for want of a better word) than the machine I'm sat at now.
I guess you'll just have to call me strange, weird or anything else you can think of for liking old computers... and I don't understand my attraction to the ZX81 or Spectrum either.
Why do I feel the need to defend myself here?
My first laptop was a Toshiba Satellite Pro, an old Pentium 75 (not even MMX) with 16MB of RAM (that I upgraded to 40MB), a 640x480 screen display(!), and a 600MB (ish) hard drive (that I tried to upgrade but couldn't, I couldn't find a compatible one except for online from Toshiba and they cost a fortune). The laptop was on it's way out when I got it (it's hard drive had errors, and the screen occasionally went funny and needed to be moved back or forward to restore), which was why my mate gave it to me and upgraded to a better one. And it too was big and clunky, but in a way that was good, as it felt solid and dependable.
But I reformated it (putting full DOS and Win95 on it, it previously had Win98 and was slow) and it worked great for a couple of years, until one day it died. And it was great for what I wanted it for; the 640x480 screen resolution would have been bad for net access, office applications and so on, but for emulators the resolution was ideal, as most emulators worked in 640x480 or a clean division (SGD looked beautiful on it, whereas on the higher res. T20 Thinkpad SGD's text looked uneven) and it even had 16 bit colour and no ghosting at all (amazing considering it's low resolution), the small hard drive was large enough for the masses of 8-bit games I stored on there, and the machine was fast enough for most DOS emulators and a few DOS games that I liked; such as Doom, Duke Nukem 3D (still a superb game) and even Carmageddon ran fairly well, with the settings on medium.
My point is, old and clunky though it was, it was great for what I wanted, and I was happy with it. It was basically (to me) a portable Spectrum, that contained hundreds of fast loading games (since they all loaded from hard drive), that also ran C64/NES/Megadrive etc games, played Carmageddon, Duke Nukem 3D etc, and allowed me to type letter when I wanted (albeit in DOS's Edit.COM, as Windows' Word processors aren't too suited to 600x480 resolution.
And if you'd be happy with a Toshiba T6600c then I hope you find one, but we were just pointing out that you could buy much better specifications for a reasonable price nowadays. When I bought the T20 Thinkpad I never looked back to the Satellite Pro; the Thinkpad's 20GB hard drive, 8MB 3D hardware, P3-700MHz CPU etc was luxury to what I was used to with the Toshiba one, and I could run lots of stuff that my earlier laptop couldn't dream of, and being able to run Unreal, Unreal Tournament, DoomGL (or whatever the 3D version of Doom I used was called), No-One Lives Forever, Alien vs. Predator etc, to say nothing of any Windows application, was fantastic. And my current laptop now runs No-one Lives Forever 2 (another superb game), Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind, Unreal Tournament 2004, which is even better. I still miss the Thinkpad's keyboard and screen, though.
You don't need to at all. We're all here as we're fans of a twenty-six year old computer that probably has less power than a modern remote control has, so we're not techno-snobs or anything (people like that hang out on PC/PS3/360 boards mostly). As I said above, we just don't want to see you pay over the odds for something that doesn't give you as much value for money as a better laptop would. Surely you'd at least want a laptop with a good resolution and colour range, a USB socket and a DVD drive, and an acceptable processor and hard drive size? If you're going to get a laptop then most people would choose one that could run as much as possible. If you are set on getting one just for emulation of low end systems (such as the Speccy and C64) then fine, that's up to you, and I respect you for going your own way (as I do by still playing Speccy games, for example, when most of my friends say "Wake up and smell the coffee! It's the 21st century. You should be playing PC or XBox 360 games blah blah blah follow each other blah blah blah" when what they mean is "Speccy games must be rubbish because they have bad graphics, whereas any game on a newer system must be more fun because it's on a newer system". Stupid, isn't it?
But if you want to run newer stuff on it, then of course you'll need a more powerful machine. Ultimately it's your money, and unless you're a sheep (like my friends who play the latest endlessly petetitive World War II shooters instead of playing less flash games that they'd enjoy more) which you're obviously not, then use your own judgement and buy a laptop that's as new or as old, as powerful or as clunky as pleases you. If everyone did that, then the software houses wouldn't keep selling the same drivel to us over and over.
Best of luck anyway.
Don't feel that way, you got it all wrong. I completely understand you when it comes to the shape of the machine. I honestly wouldn't mind owning a big, bulky Cray myself :-)
However, I can understand your interest in an old PC laptop. They aren't so dull, and many old ones are very quirky due to the design compromises that had to be made to stuff them into a reasonably portable case.
I was given a while back an unbranded laptop, probably from the early 90s called a "Multimedia laptop". It has about the footprint of my G4 PowerBook, but is three times thicker and three times heavier, and looks extremely clunky. Sadly, the keyboard membrane has failed, and many of the keys stopped working, but the NiMH battery holds a good charge! I also have one of those late 80s Amstrad laptops with the full size enhanced AT keyboard, and the little supertwist LCD that pops up on the left (and runs on D cell batteries). But each of them is innovative in its own way to fit the design limitations that were imposed on it.
The Amstrad is obviously the most interesting. (The CPU, a NEC V20, will run in 8086 mode and Z80 mode, so it natively can run CP/M too). Pity I no longer have a boot disc for it (I'm sure one can be made).
But even so, even PC laptops aren't as interesting as the 8 or 16 bit systems, they still are at the end of the day PeeCee clones.
Winston summed it up perfectly:
I'm glad I'm not the only one who can see this.
My reason for asking about the price was because I didn't want to see my non-computer savvy neighbours abuse, break and lose something that could be worth a few quid. I would like one but I have no idea what I could use it for except old DOS games or one of the older DOS Spectrum emus running on it.
ZNorxman: if I find a Cray at a carboot sale or somewhere I'll be sure to let you know ;)
I used to use it solely as a machine for transferring files between PC and CBM disk drives, as it was more stable than using a more modern PC, yet was still liable to crash every 10 minutes when transferring.
I got rid of it as I've recently got hold of an Amstrad PPC660 portable, which is MS-DOS only to do the same job, though I've not used it yet.
Calm down ! Touchy !!!
I can 100% understand people playing games on their original Speccys rather than solely emulators. Just i must admit its the first time i've heard of people liking old laptops. To me laptops are all the same, a huge great bulky mother taking 5 minutes to load up isnt my idea of fun that was all but yep each to their own.
Only a couple of years back I had to fire it into proper us as an internet machine using the PCM card slot because my desktop bit the dust.
We recently bought an old ?30 Toshiba CDT laptop for my parents-in-law-to-be. They want to know if they'll use a laptop and the internet before taking the plunge and spending ?300 on a higher spec machine. Turns out they have been using the net so probably will be investing in something more modern in the near future.