FS: Toshiba Portege 7200CTe (or trade for 19" LCD)

[asiafish]

This is basically Toshiba's take on the ThinkPad 570X.

Pentium III 600 MHz
192MB RAM (Max 320MB)
40GB Hard Drive (not sure of speed, probably 4200)
13.3" XGA (1024X768) display
Accupoint Mouse (Toshiba's TrackPoint knock-off)
8MB S3 Savage IX (same as ThinkPad T20)
56K Modem, USB, Infrared and VGA ports on the chasis
1" Thick, 4.8 LBS

This is a seriously beautiful computer, with magesium case and a silver finish to the display cover. It has a very good keyboard that is softer than a ThinkPad's, but has excellent action and quality switches.

The machine has a 6-cell battery that is almost dead (lasts about 15 minutes), but can run for almost 3 hours on a new one. They also made a giant 12-cell battery that was good for over 5 hours, which can still be found on eBay from time-to-time. It also comes with the AC adapter, which is the same as the one used on all Toshibas from about 1995 to the present.

Included with the machine is the DVD network dock, which includes a removable DVD ROM (swappable with other Toshiba standard-height optical drives and hard drive enclosures), a floppy drive, legacy ports and a 10/100 network card (a good 3Com chipset). The dock also duplicates all ports, adding S-Video and Composite video outputs, a pair of good-sounding speakers and full desktop PC ports (parallel, serial, VGA, PS/2).

Build quality on this machine is actually better than that of any ThinkPad I've owned, including the legendary 600 series. This machine feels like it was carved out of a single, solid block of magnesium, with absolutely zero flex. This remains a truly luxurious machine to work with and is actually quite fast with either Windows 2000 or Linux. XP is fine on these if you max the ram, but as I run Windows 2000 I didn't bother.

Now for the bad news. There is no COA, and as such, I am not including an operating system. I've used this with Windows 98 SE (which it had on it when I bought it), Windows 2000 and Ubuntu 7.04, all of which worked flawlessly.

I'm looking for $175 shipped anywhere in the lower 48.

I would also take a nice 19" LCD monitor as an even trade.

This was Toshiba's top-of-the-line executive machine in 1999 and uses most of the same internal components as a ThinkPad T20, which is about 6 months newer.

[dorronto]

Sounds good Andrew. Actually, I'm more impressed with a Mac guy using Linux. I dabble with Linux myself at times......................

Good luck. asiafish is highly recommended.

Ron

[asiafish]

I avoided Linux for years because of the difficulty of getting things like wifi and DVD movie playback to work. The biggest deal-killer remains the lack of MS Office, but Ubuntu 7 (finally) makes it semi-easy to get those things working.

THeir website even had plain-English help to get Wine and Office 2000 working. I've got Ubuntu dual-booting with Windows 2000 on my X30 with terrific results.

I'd keep this machine, but I need another 19" LCD and don't want to spend any money.

Speaking of which, I'll trade the computer straight up for a nice 19" LCD if anyone is interested.