When Did You Get Your First Laptop

[buwish]

In a previous thread I showed everyone the very first laptop computer: the "Osborne 1," which came about in 1981.

That got me to thinking about when everyone on here got their first laptop. I must admit that I was a bit late getting into the laptop game, as my first was in 2003. Up until then, I was a desktop user back into the late 80's (even though I barely remember the specifics, as I was quite young then). Since 03' though, I've had quite a few laptops (not by choice, which is how one learns a lot about them while taking defective ones apart).

So, when did you get your first laptop?

 

[Maziar]

I got my XPS M1730 about 3 years ago and had to sell it after one month lol(due to many problems),from then i haven't bought any laptops yet.

 

[jsc]

The Osbourne and the nearly contemporary Kaypro came out earlier than 1981. Both were considered as portables - "luggables" was the popular term.

So, by your rules, 1980 Kaypro.
By my rules, 2004 or 2005 HP.

 

[lostandwandering]

My laptop is going on it's fourth year of service now. However, until a couple of months ago my dad's IBM ThinkPad from 1995 was still lying around.....

 

[Maziar]

It seems your Sager has been rock solid Logan,right ?

 

[lostandwandering]

It seems your Sager has been rock solid Logan,right ?

Yup, pretty much. I've had to replace both screen hinges and the case is cracked near the DVD drive from a drop, but otherwise no issues. 9 lbs of laptop doesn't react too well to drops 😱

 

[buwish]

Indeed, I saw the Kaypro, but never any mention of it being a "laptop" or a "luggable." Whatever the case is, they both look like fancy typewriters to me. 😉

 

[Avro Arrow]

My first laptop was a Dell Latitude C610 that I got for college. The thing is seemingly indestructible. I still use it for my magicjack. I've never believed in getting a powerful laptop because they're technological dead-ends that cannot be upgraded. I bought the laptop I'm on now about a year ago on sale for $300CAD. It's an eMachines E620-5885 a.k.a. Acer Aspire 5515. It just has a single-core AMD Athlon 64 2650e 1.6GHz and 2GB of DDR2. It originally came with Windows Vista Home Basic which I quickly got rid of in favour of Windows XP Pro. It went from being a slug to a decently fast machine. I only use it for general university work, web browsing and teleconferencing. For what I need, it more than fits the bill. Since I have my powerful gaming desktop that I built, I have no need for power in a laptop, just portability. Since the cost of a powerful laptop is roughly equal to the price of a powerful desktop and inexpensive laptop, the latter route IMO is the one to take.

 

[MarkG]

I've never believed in getting a powerful laptop because they're technological dead-ends that cannot be upgraded.

But then you need a desktop machine too if you want to do anything that requires a lot of performance. When the keys started falling off my old Core Duo Acer I bought a new i5 laptop for $1000 which is about 4x faster than the Acer and can play all my games much better than my old P4 desktop with its Nvidia 7800 card; in fact it's now the fastest PC in the house.

That means I can put off replacing the P4 for at least another year, which saves at least as much as the few hundred dollars difference between a decent performance laptop and a cheap one that can't play games or edit HD video.

I'm also quite impressed that Linux claims it's only using 11W when idle, which is only about 50% more than the Atom netbook and probably less than my first laptop with its 486DX2-66.

 

[buwish]

But then you need a desktop machine too if you want to do anything that requires a lot of performance.

That's half the fun though You have old reliable, i.e. a laptop and then a desktop that is constantly being torn down and built back up to keep up with the times.

 

[duk3]

But then you need a desktop machine too if you want to do anything that requires a lot of performance.

That's why he said:

Since the cost of a powerful laptop is roughly equal to the price of a powerful desktop and inexpensive laptop, the latter route IMO is the one to take.

 

[MarkG]

That's why he said:

But it's not true. If you bought any half-decent laptop and a desktop that's at least as fast as my laptop you'd probably end up spending more and being disappointed in the performance of the desktop system if you tried running recent games at higher resolution than a laptop screen.

Perhaps it's true if you're spending $3000 for a laptop with SLI graphics, but how many people are going to do that?

 

[wa1]

I bought my Toshiba M200 about 3 years ago, still running fine, just for college works...

 

[Saga Lout]

I'm the only one so far who voted for 1986-1990 in your Poll as I bought a little NEC laptop which was a grey import into the UK in 1988. I still have it in a drawer in my office and when I open up later, I'll fish out some more details of it. It had a word processor, a very basic spreadsheet, a database application and I think it could actually connect to a telephone line. It cost me £125 which on reflection, was ridiculously cheap.[/#000ff]

EDIT- it's a Starlet NEC Portable Computer PC-8401A-LS and it won't work on mains electricity as the moment - maybe it needs batteries as well. I have all the booklets that went with it - Wordstar to Go, Calc to Go, Personal Filer and Telecoms and I might just let the local Museum have it. That's a serious comment - they actually have 1990's mobile phones in there.

 

[kiren]

My first laptop was a Dell Pentium 100MHz, with the crappy dual-scan LCD and no-cdrom. But I received it as broken and got it to work with a simple reinstall of Win95 (from floppies yay!) Turned out the disk had a half dozen or so bad sectors, one of which must have contained some critical o/s file, fortunately for me no other sectors ever went bad for the duration of the time I had it.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Well the poll's closed but I got mine in 2004. A used Dell Latitude C610 for $800 and I used it for school. I still use it to run my magic jack even though it's physically falling apart.