Not a fair comparison. The Porteges are ultraportable laptops and are equivalent to the X-series Thinkpads. Ultraportables tend to be not as reliable as mainstream laptops such as those in your signature, because corners are cut to shed weight. For example, the X2* Thinkpads that I used to own were less reliable than my T2*. The Porteges from the late 1990s and early 2000s actually had decent to great build quality. Starting with the Pentium M era, however, Toshiba tried so hard to make the "thinnest and lightest" Porteges that they began to get fragile. The display lid of my Portege R100 was so soft that it had almost as many craters as the moon. That R100 weighed only 2.38 lbs, 0.4 lbs lighter than the X40 Thinkpad that I had at the same time. A couple years later, the Portege R500 dropped further to 1.72 lbs (for models without optical drive). Needless to say, I wasn't interested in getting one, knowing it was most likely even more delicate than the R100.brchan wrote:One of my relatives had 2 work-issued business laptops ranging from the late 90s to 2002. Both were Toshiba Porteges. None of them were reliable after a few years. The oldest Portege developed a power jack issue, and the other overheated and froze often. All the Thinkpads in my sig have worked without issue, other than dead batteries, and a failing fan in my T43.
Well, back then many other brands had good laptops too, for example my Dell Inspiron 7500 is probably a little older than your T20 but it's still running XP SP3 impressively well, and it has not just one but two internal HDDs (320GB + 250GB). Dell, Toshiba, Compaq, HP and others weren't producing "craptops" until they started to minimize costs. Even their business-class laptops took a hit. By contrast, IBM continued to emphasize quality, which of course was why we all became Thinkpad fans.ajkula66 wrote:FWIW, my work-issued T20 is still kicking almost 15 years later...One great laptop. Period.