Anyone here ever heard of M-Tech laptops?

[iCe]

They spec out pretty nice. But... if you do all the bells and whistsles they get kind of pricey. But, how many laptops out there let you install (2) 7200 RPM 100Gb SATA drives and set them up as RAID 1. Dual core AMD processor... 2 Gb RAM... for a laptop... it's pretty kick-ass... if they are reliable.

LINK

[kenw]

compaq had dual HDD drives back in the 486 days. It's still common in their commercial units. Whether or not you can do raid with them i dunno.

[NoLight]

Never heard of them but seem like they would be really nice..

[iCe]

Originally Posted by kenw

compaq had dual HDD drives back in the 486 days. It's still common in their commercial units. Whether or not you can do raid with them i dunno.

Yeah but those were like 10Mb each back then Just kidding. I started working on PC's when DOS2.0 was the king and hard drives were a dream. 8088 processor... IBM PC... DUAL 5.25" floppies... rockin... I even had an RGB Screen. I'm talkin color now... not that green thing... COLOR!! Woo hoo!!! When the 10 Mb drive came in I was in heaven... No more floppy swapping... then the 286... lightning speed... Ahhh... 2005.. what a great year Actually it was 1988 I think...

[kenw]

actually, when I started, floppies were 8", screens were green and processors were an entire board of chips.

that was 1977.

but the modern Compaq/HP can still do dual HDDs, and they're as big as you can get anywhere, but x2. Typically they use what is called a Multi-bay for the 2nd drive, and that multibay can also hold a 2nd battery on some units.

Over the years, I had Compaq notebooks with a multibay that could handle a 2nd HDD, a 2nd battery (in one case a 3rd battery), an LS120 drive, floppy or a "weight-saver", which was an empty tray that could hold all sorts of stuff like earphones, etc. With 3 batteries and power management, I could stay on from DFW to Narita.

as far as M-Tech goes, it doesn't surprise me that they have some pretty advanced features. An upstart like that (never heard of them myself, but that doesn't mean much anymore) needs some way to attract your attention away from the HPs and Dulls. And like most, the base unit is usually priced to compete, but the options are the moneymakers.

[Murph]

I HAD one of those, a Zenith 8088 Z150 and I put a NEC V20 chip in it to make it a 5 mhz machine AND replaced a 5.25" drive with a 720k 3.5" drive. Then I got a second hand 20 Megabyte hard drive from a buddy. I had a CGA card, and 640k of ram. Then DOS 3.0/3.1.

Werd!

Originally Posted by iCe

Yeah but those were like 10Mb each back then Just kidding. I started working on PC's when DOS2.0 was the king and hard drives were a dream. 8088 processor... IBM PC... DUAL 5.25" floppies... rockin... I even had an RGB Screen. I'm talkin color now... not that green thing... COLOR!! Woo hoo!!! When the 10 Mb drive came in I was in heaven... No more floppy swapping... then the 286... lightning speed... Ahhh... 2005.. what a great year Actually it was 1988 I think...

[iCe]

Somewhere around here I have one of those 8" floppies. I can't remember where we used it. The engineering firm that I started with ran all their simulations on a main frame. The sim program was on tape and it would take a day, sometimes two, to run a simple simulation that is complete in milliseconds on a desktop PC today... amazing progress...

Murph- 640k of ram? Man.... you were stylin. Batch files... and debug... that was cool.

[Daniel Bates]

Heh... my first computer was a 386DX. It was a little younger than I was (released in 1991 I think).

[JamesB]

Never heard of them. But remember all the parts are made by someone else and then assembled by someone else and probablly sold as M-Tech. Heck it could be a dell or HP for all you know

James

[Murph]

Yeah, but my PCjr (Anyone remember those?) had 128k and a single 5.25" floppy. BUT it had a color monitor!

[kenw]

"Heck it could be a dell or HP for all you know"

that's something I can virtually assure you it isn't....it's probably a Chinese or Tiawanese OEM. they may be a major player in the far-eastern markets already, and just now tapping the US market. They may also make stuff FOR the Big Boys, but the Big Boys most assuredly don't make stuff for others.

[iCe]

Originally Posted by kenw

"Heck it could be a dell or HP for all you know"

that's something I can virtually assure you it isn't....it's probably a Chinese or Tiawanese OEM. they may be a major player in the far-eastern markets already, and just now tapping the US market. They may also make stuff FOR the Big Boys, but the Big Boys most assuredly don't make stuff for others.

Who knows... they build whatever they are. A friend of mine ordered one and he's like me in that he works outside and requires industrial strength from his laptop (My IBM fell about 6' to a concrete floor a few months ago. It landed face down, jerked a PCMCIA serial card out, chipped the corner, bent a USB port, which still works, and the battery popped out. I figured it was toast as I was updating the OS on a touch panel and it was read / writing the drive when it got knocked off the stand it was on. I put the battery back in, hit the power button, and she booted right up I went back out and started downloading the OS to a touch panel. Unreal. I still don't like IBM laptops... but they are stout).

It looks like they cater to gamers. They overclock the "stuff" out of the dual core processors... have high end vid cards, lots of ram, dual SATA drives (which is not a typical drive for a laptop), etc.