Hello,
I have a old laptop with usb ports only, it has been showing signs of wear and tear and I have an even older laptop that I use for mostly DOS programs.
Problem is DOS laptop died... USB laptop is starting to fail and my manager is asking what I need, at a minimal expense of course.
So I thought I would throw this problem out here and see what comes up.
I need all the help I can get, our IT-person is no help at all.
Thanks,
Flemming007

If cost is the main concern, I would look for a used Panasonic CF-27 on ebay. I can personally vouch for their ability to run DOS programs as well as Windows XP. (As a dual boot, of course). They have a USB port and a real RS232 and parallel printer port, 2 PCMCIA slots (and is compatible with the series A 1784-PCMK if you're into A-B PLCs)

And needless to say, they're built like a tank and will last darn near forever.

Now that the off-lease CF-28s are flooding the market, prices on 27s have gone way down. You can probably get a PII-300 model with a 13.3" screen for $100-150. If that's even too much you can probably get a P-200 CF27 for $75 or so. I'd recommend a CF25 because you can get those for a song, but you said you needed USB.

Hi gravitar,

Oh yeah... cost is a concern. But the Japanese at my company will not let me use eBay! I have been trying to get them to let me use eBay to purchase used Omron and Mitsubishi hardware. No such luck.

My USB laptop has been slowing me down for 8 months and I couldn't finish a reprogram on a machine the other week and now... since they are seeing its the laptop thats at fault, they are willing to look into a replacement.

I have already suggested a dual boot setup, but our IT-person suggested using a virtual window setup. I can already see problems.

I appreciate the info and will continue to push for the dual boot system. I did try to load some of the software on a win98 laptop, no good. Most of the software is only compatable with win95.

Thanks again,
Flemming007

Yeah, there's still some out there that don't understand or don't believe in ebay. Usually though, that's because they believe in buying new. If they're bargain hunters, they would do well to keep an open mind! What you might try doing is look for some of the big players on ebay, and ask them if they'll offer you a quotation on a direct sale. If all else fails, let me know and I'll give you a price on one. I've got several extra 27's at the moment.

Two dirty tricks. First, VMWare is really, really good. It tends to be able to emulate just about any platform. Many developers (I can vouch that GE Fanuc uses it internally at least) use it. Basically, you have "bootable images" on your hard drive. You load the appropriate one as needed. All hardware devices are emulated. It is not possible (especially when your targets are W95 & DOS) for the software to be able to detect what platform it's on since everything hardware-wise is emulated.

This allows you to step up to a current (P4 Mobile, dual-core whatever, or AMD Mobile) laptop, and yet still run anything you want. If you're really concerned, I believe VMWare has some sort of demo thing that lets you test this ahead of time.

Another good alternative is DOSEMU or Bochs, which are both Linux programs. They basically do the same thing, although if I remember correctly, one does a slightly better job with emulation than the other.

All of these packages do exactly the same thing. They trap all instructions that attempt to access the "real" hardware and emulate that. Everything else is allowed to run natively in "386 mode". About the only way a program could ever detect that it is running in an emulated "box" is that instruction timing in many cases could return some really funky results.

These emulators are emulating the machine down to the hardware level. The Mac versions even go so far as to emulate the CPU, too. This is WAY superior to the built-in W95/98/XP methods. . The built-in Windows methods do not trap ALL calls, substitute current OS responses for the original DOS/Windows ones, and will return current responses to calls such as ones to detect the OS. For instance if I recall correctly, Windows XP response with "DOS 8.0" or some such if the software requests the DOS version number.

You can use FreeDOS if you want to get away from "DOS" itself, too. It works MOST of the time. There are a few annoying progams that I ran into that freaked out when they tried to detect DOS versions, forcing me to use "PC DOS 6.0" (good luck finding boot disks for that!)

As to USB-only, once you've gone down the emulator road, you can use the USB/RS-232 dongles to get around the fact that current hardware with real RS-232 ports is becoming extinct. I hate carrying around yet another cable but it seems like this is becoming more and more common. About the only advantage I've found yet is that if a pin gets bent, I lost a $15 dongle instead of a laptop motherboard. If I'm going to be using that port frequently, I'll go buy a Digi One SP for about $100 and convert the serial port to an Ethernet port.

good suggestions but when someone asks me what i need, i pick something that costs few $1000s (at the very least 1k more
than what is really needed) and - i don't go unprepared (have to have few good reasons why).
this tends to soften them and makes them more open to negotiate. if you just find something for few bucks,
they will just try to cut corners and squeeze it even more...

while i was looking for cheap windows laptop, i was getting cheap laptop, when i told them that this doesn't cut it
and something significantly bigger is needed - i got what i wanted. so in just over a year, from bad desktop and even
worse laptop, an old inkjet printer and lousy dialup connection i got to very nice laptop loaded with features, high speed
connection, big and fast multifunction laser printer etc.

if you don't ask, you will never get it...

virtual machines are where things are moving to but I would rather have a dual boot set up for stability. My experience with virtual machines and virtual servers is that some unespected problems might appear out of nowhere which can usually be fixed but it takes allot of reading and spent time. So for now i would stick to a dual boot set up.

If you can show that the new equipment will save or make more money then you will always get the bean counters attention.
When asking for something new I always make sure I can give actual numbers (numbers I can make).
Saying "It works better" is not enough.

As for virtual os. I use it. I have a Win98SE boot on 2 of my laptops. The third runs just Win98SE, I keep it around because of the power output of the serial port.

You also need to look at what your connecting to. Is it time for it to be upgraded instead of making your laptop backward compatable.

You may want to try a PCMCIA card for the se rial port. They supply power and use the same interrupts as the old serial ports. The one I have is from www.quatech.com. New laptops now have Express card slots to make your life even more miserable.

I will second the PCMCIA route, i have used the Brainboxes ones with Mitsubishi GX-Developer, GX-IEC-Developer and the old Medoc DOS program and heaps of other legacy programming tools for Redlion, Schneider etc. all in windows XP Pro with no problems

The only thing to watch for is that some older programs will only give you access to COM1 or COM2, these are usually nabbed by newer laptops for Blutetooth ports and other associated garbage, so you may have to use the hardware manager to move things around a bit