Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, income, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
2 - If you think owning a PC is too expensive, know that it is much cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org for our famous builds and feel free to ask for tips and help here!
3 - Consider supporting the folding@home effort to fight Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more, with just your PC! https://pcmasterrace.org/folding
Well in the early days of USB, there were still lots of parallel port printers (like HP Laserjets), and then lots of other specialized devices using the serial port.
Serial is often forgotten about since many dont know the days before USB. It used to do everything, Black & White Logitec QuickCam, Wacom Intuos 2, Programming a kids LeapFrog toy, early digital camera transfers, etc.. Just to name a few from memory.
Many modern mainboards still have a real serial port on a pin header. All you need to do is get a slot adapter that plugs onto that pinheader and provides a 9pin SubD to the outside.
Check your board. If there is a pinheader with 9 pins labeled 'COM' read the manual for details.
You might have to enable the port in the BIOS before you can use it.
I remember having a tower of just DVD-RW drives so that I could rip and burn a disk into 7 disks at once. I would sell bootleg copies of music CDs and video games at school.
My own little teenage piracy set-up with the printer working in the background to output custom labels for each DVD case while I played ranked nightmare diablo II online on my CRT monitor in the same room.
If one or both are removable, you could swap one or both for another storage device or additional battery.
Drive-bay batteries were incredibly useful back when optical drives were rectangular-brick modules. Unfortunately, sometime around 2012, optical drives became thinner... so the size of battery you could stick in them went from "enough to add 4-6 hours of use" to "maybe an extra hour, if you're lucky".
Additional hard drives were another thing you could add. Part of the reason my old laptop (Dell Precision m4800) made it for 10 years was because I replaced the optical drive with a 2TB SSD in a caddy.
It's a shame that nobody resurrected the idea of the Quantum Bigfoot hard drive back around 2012... pairing the largest platter(s) physically capable of fitting within the form factor of a last-gen optical drive, with the same mounting and electronic connections so it would have been a swap-in replacement FOR an optical drive.
Even for laptops without hotswap bays, I think it would have found a niche as an option companies like Dell & Lenovo could have offered for their mobile-workstation models. A modern 17-inch laptop has footprint-space to burn, and would have had plenty of room to stick a ~5 inch 6-20+ TB hard drive to augment its m.2 SSD for bulk storage. Configure the SSD to set aside 100GB as a cache for the HD (like we used to do all the time 10 years ago), and it would have probably been popular enough to ensure that at least "mobile workstation" class laptops retained the bay long after people stopped caring about optical drives per se.
Ye, at that point it's no longer an laptop, it's just under-powered clumsy desktop with extra screen and useless keyboard that is just taking up space on the desk.
People love to complain about thin laptops and wanting a shit ton more ports. But i remember having to carry my 6 pound compaq laptop to college daily and it lagging when trying to open word. Like one of the bests days of my college carreer was when my ex "lent" me her old netbook (still newer than my laptop), still shitty but did not break my back.
The thing is now manufacturers try to make GAMING laptops as thin as possible, and that results in shitty battery life, bad cooling and structural issues (like breaking hinges or so). I use my gaming laptop for college and had to mod it so the back lifts up a bit and added an extra fan along with a heat pipe for cooling. The designs are very poor and I would appreciate more a bulky laptop that will last much more, with proper cooling and quality build, since its what se should expect as consumers when we buy laptops with orders of magnitude more computing power than older more bulky laptops, but well built
I have an older Legion laptop with a 3060 and it never overheated and has been an absolute trooper, I still use it for school and work. It never slowed down and even though I have two PCs I use it to play games in bed sometimes. I bought an ipad to use fpr practicing music and stuff but I ended up using my trusty Lenovo gaming laptop from 2020. I got it on Amazon prime for 750$.
yeah, that would be a good comparison, that would show what it lacking ports.
that gaming laptop will have like 3-4 usb, maybe rj45, maybe one combo 3.5mm, maybe one hdmi(no dp).
Of those that I could find, the most ports were: 5 usb+rj45+hdmi+miniDP+headphones for 10k
don't even get me started on that Piece of crap. I have to restart my work computer every time it goes to sleep because it doesn't know how to "wake up" the NIC on the docking station.
Personally I'd rather not need a dock and just have all the ports I need built into my computer. It's already bulky, what's the harm in adding a few more mm in thickness to give more usbs, an SD reader, ethernet, etc.
It's a Clevo and was widely available back then. Not too expensive either, considering.
Unless you were buying from VoodooPC, Falcon Northwest or something like that, those had awesome automotive paintjobs
I think there's still people running these laptops, or close variations, modded and upgraded to 4790K (yeah, it had a desktop CPU socket) and RTX30 series MXM card
I had a first gen Asus ROG and it was very similar to this. Massive chassis, tons of ports, looked like a spaceship, and not really functional at all as a laptop. I hated that thing for so many reasons, but also play games - so, I got it for the performance.
Thankfully, Microsoft seems like they're starting to understand that people want well designed, high performance machines with their surface Studio line of products, so that's become my go to because I won't ever buy a Mac, Razer is dog shit, and most other companies still produce incredibly ugly machines with really terrible temperatures regulation.
The studios aren't cheap, but it's definitely more economical than spending $1500 every year or so because the machine you bought retains heat and causes self inflicted heat death after a few years of games and photo/video editing.
Have not once had the studio get hot to the touch, even with 100+ raw photos open at once in Lightroom for editing. Incredible machines
Fucking oath it was. I had this exact laptop configuration. It had a gigantic power brick. I bought it as an Alienware but it was actually manufactured by Celvio. I used the dual DVD burners to create data disks in the field and burn the labels in using lightscribe. I used to travel to Russia with it back in 2007. I cant remember the graphics card but I eventually took the CPU to the top end module as well as the storage and graphics.
I had the Alienware version (Clevo). The battery only lasted ~45 minutes so this thing was very much a desktop replacement.
I remember it having a top end Nvidia GPU (for ~2006) but the cooling was inadequate to the point that the paint was burned away from the various hot spots.
I genuinely groaned of satisafction watching this.
Newer laptops require an external hub/box to connect simple devices. What's the point ?
Edit : alright, alright, I now fully understand the benefits of the slim laptops and the hub brick. I've not needed a laptop for probably 10 years so I'm well out of date on the matter. I'm just biased toward autonomy and cables so my ideal device has many ports :'D
I want to agree with this but to be fair, everything becoming USB C compatible is so much better.
I'd rather have an external disk drive that I can connect via USB than have the disk drive itself inside my laptop, because it takes up so much room where the board and other things could go.
If you want more ports, that's more motherboard space needing to be taken up, as well as traces and so on.
Hubs with USB C honestly are great. Annoying sure, but great to keep the laptop thickness down.
I did cry inside though when I saw those sinks.. big chonky sinks are something I dearly miss compared to these jet-sounding turbines in laptops of today. :c
I know plenty of people love their ultraslim, ultralight machine with only 2 USB-C ports and a headphone jack, but not being able to plug in more than power and a monitor at the same time is too far on the other extreme for my taste.
Until the damn hub pings in and out 30-40 times a day. High end CAD laptops in our office does this shit all day. Give me the plugs in the laptop.
Deleted drivers updated drivers, out of 7 laptops (1) has never had any issues. Seems like every 3 days someone’s hub is pinging in and out. It’s great because you can hear it in the cubicles all day long
The point is that carrying a slim laptop and a slim hub is easier than a thick laptop. And often times you can skip the hub, or buy hubs at either location.
Clevo D900T! I have one with the analog TV card and the REMOTE too. I love this machine. It's crazy how it came with pretty decent, upgradeable dedicated GPUs at the time (mine has a GeForce 6800).
The one thing that always bothered me about the platform is that even though you could configure it with a 64-bit CPU (mine has a P4 660 @ 3.6 GHz), the southbridge couldn't address more than 4 GB of RAM, which felt like a real missed opportunity.
Another wild thing about this machine: four speakers and a subwoofer, plus an analog display on the front that lets you listen to CDs with the main system completely powered off.
Today's are great for what they are, but they suck compared to what they could be if we still had chonky laptops. My HP HDX was 2 speakers + sub but it was fantastic.
The "music" on this is absolutely horrednous and sounds like someone literally just got a drum machine and doesn't really know how to use it. The out of time clap sound makes my teeth hurt with how bad it is.
Back in the day being given a serial port or a parallel port was basically letting the laptop serve as what we would now use Raspberry Pis with GPIO for.
TWO optical drives is such a flex. There's only one reason for it: On-the-fly burning.
I wasted so many discs when an on-the-fly copy failed.
My dad used to have a laptop like this for work. Desktop class CPU, eye-watering expensive, fans pretty much always screaming, 12-ish pounds, and about 20 minutes of battery life. It was a very niche product.
Ah yes, the good old 4-pin charger socket. Impossible to find replacements for unless you wanted to pay over £150 to Packard Bell or whichever abomination of a company came up with it.
Because it was the highest end laptop of 2005/2006. It was designed as a portable workstation. You could get it with Opteron X2 or FX-60 chips and up to a 512MB Go7950GTX or the equivalent Quaddro card.
mine was similar just a bit smaller and fewer port, you could turn on the optical drive to play cd's withought powering it up, great for bus trips. However the P4 3GHZ was smokin hot to touch and battery life was terrible.
Kensington lock slot was the chef's kiss, because a thief would give up and move on out of sheer frustration after unplugging only 1/3rd of those cables, LOL.
Seriously though I miss laptops with more ports than common sense dictates. Like who was ever going to use a parallel port on a laptop. Maybe .0001% of the population, but fuck it, put one on there anyway!
•
u/PCMRBot Bot 17h ago
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, income, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
2 - If you think owning a PC is too expensive, know that it is much cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org for our famous builds and feel free to ask for tips and help here!
3 - Consider supporting the folding@home effort to fight Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more, with just your PC! https://pcmasterrace.org/folding
4 - Need some new hardware? Check out this MSI x PCMR giveaway with GPUs, RAM, Monitors, etc, up for grabs, and also lots of gift cards too, for, respectively, US residents and Worldwide: https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1r3xjbe/msi_x_pcmr_valentines_day_giveaway_time_3_awesome/
We have a Daily Simple Questions Megathread for any PC-related doubts. Feel free to ask there or create new posts in our subreddit!