Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!dali.cs.montana.edu!caen!sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!uunet!stanford.edu!agate!agate!phr From: phr@lightning.Berkeley.EDU (Paul Rubin) Newsgroups: comp.sys.laptops Subject: Re: Why so little variety? Message-ID: Date: 7 May 91 09:09:06 GMT References: <1991May7.000748.18429@xanadu.com> Sender: root@agate.berkeley.edu (Charlie Root) Organization: ucb Lines: 23 In-Reply-To: ravi@xanadu.com's message of 7 May 91 00: 07:48 GMT OVER 10 Mb RAM -- only the Tandon (and its OEMs) does this, and only Tandon uses *industry*standard* memory expansion that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I could expand it to 16Mb for one third the cost of 4Mb for a Compaq LTE 386s (admittedly an extreme example). Are laptop manufacturers going to have to learn all over again the sense of using standard SIMMs instead of expensive proprietary schemes? I thought Check out the Dataworld machine advertised in the current laptop rags. It uses standard simms (can take 16 meg), runs at 20 mhz, and uses standard D-size 4AH nicads that don't cost an arm and a leg. It's the only such machine I know of to use standard batteries instead of expensive proprietary schemes. It does, however, have a floppy. I believe that standard simms use more battery power than at least some of the expensive memory modules used by some laptop vendors. I really love my Toshiba T1000's ability to retain RAM data for several weeks on a battery charge when the rest of the machine is powered off. (Configuring the battery-backed-up ram as a ramdisk means never needing to access the floppy). I don't know of any 386 notebook computers with that feature except maybe the T2000SX, which is very expensive.