I'm thinking about getting an early Pentium Laptop for use with DOS.
I always wanted a desktop PC, but it occured to me I don't really have the space for it and a Laptop would be nice. So I was browsing about eBay and I found an IBM ThinkPad 380ED.
As you probably don't know the ThinkPads by their Numbers, here's the specs:
Pentium 166 MHz
32 MB RAM
12.1" screen
1,44MB FDD
CD-ROM drive
Soundblaster 16 compatible Soundcard
It comes with a power cord, and I don't know wether
the battery still works, but I would be using it on the desk, anyway.
The price is 99€. I think I just fell in love with it,
but what do you think?

WELL IVE GOT ONE SIMILER TO THAT BUT 200MHZ ITS GOOD CAUSE YOU AN PLAY GAMES LIKE AGE OF EMPIRES ETC GO FOR IT...

I had an old Pentium III 600 Mhz laptop and I never had much fun using it with pure DOS. The on-board sound chip used to crash with a horrible *creeeeeach-crrzzzl* out of the speakers soon after I started a DOS game with sound. After a while I figured that it was in fact a combined driver/hardware problem. The DOS driver wasn't fully compatible and caused the chip to lock up until reboot. It didn't occur in Windows (Millenium Edition btw LOL), maybe because this driver had a higher priority in development which resulted in better testing. Of course this is a very specific an possibly unique problem, but you never know what you will get.

Also the LCD had some problems adjusting to the old games' screen resolution. Often I got only a tiny view with huge black borders. And if the display managed to adjust it to fullscreen, then the quality of the resized image was awful. (At least nowhere near of today's fullscreen interpolation.) This is surely a more common problem.


Now you know about my laptop's adventures in the lands of DOS. (May it rest in peace...)

Hopefully yours will be more lucky. ;)

I would buy it if I were you

me too. But I'm still thinking. I don't know why not to buy it, but still im hesitant.
Do any of you have experience with pure dos laptops?

Well...It could always have been dropped or something....So I would be cautious if I couldn't see it running before spending that much.

As for DOS on laptops. I ran mine dual boot DOS/Linux for about 6 months. Had about 150mb of disk space for DOS and some games, and used CDs and a Zip250 to swap things in and out when I wanted something new.

Do it.

This PC seems just right for me, if you want to use pure DOS. I'm not really a tech expert, but I would buy that thing.

Also, if you experience serious troubles with DOS at any time, you should always be able to upgrade this thing to Win 3.1 or 95.

If you want to play DOS only games on it you may buy it, but the price seems too big to me.

(though a Pentium II 266 MHz, 128 MB RAM, 3.92 hard disk and a 2 MB Video Card wouldn't be very expensive -I think- and on it you could also install Windows 98 SE which has MS-DOS and thus be able to do more things on it)

It's never been used. Although you're right about the price.
I'm still looking for alternatives.

What's never been used ? (sorry if this is a stupid question, but it's 11PM here and I'm sleepy...)