Toshiba Tecra M10 14in notebook

This Dell Latitude D630 I'm using has a serial port

and a seemingly identical layout of trackpad/pointy stick/mouse buttons. No eSATA, mind you, but then it's nowhere near as thick or heavy, and only fairly ugly.

If you'll excuse me, I'm off to reminisce about my first laptop, a Toshiba of some vintage running Win3.11 which was seemingly indestructible (the Toshiba, not Win3.11, which barfed its drivers at least once a month).

Serial port.

I just looked at the back of this 'ere new Dell Lassitude wot I woz given and it's got one too. Not so uncommon then.

Makes sense. In the corp world, printers are shared over the network and USB is de rigeur in the local-to-machine printer world so a parallel port is genuinely redundant.

However, there's a shitload of legacy, sometimes custom and costly to replace bits 'n bobs knocking around in corporate lala land that you need a serial port to talk to. Now, while 99.99% of the users'll never need a serial port, it's still on the "must have" list for a large number of corporate purchasers. I think that Toshiba (and Dell for that matter) know this.

*cough*

'Sure stiff is better than floppy, but one-handed operation is better than two.'

Lines like that make Reg reviews things of beauty.

Retro Looks

Personally I find the styling of these Toshiba laptops quite pleasing in a stark, functional, minimalist sort of way. Much prefer it to a lot of the flashy, over designed notebooks that you often see.

I just bought an Satellite Pro S300-121 for a staffer, for less than half the price of this model, and I am fairly pleased with it. Externally, it looks almost identical to the review model except it is a little bigger (15.4) and doesn't have a nipple. I have to admit thought that the looks were the last thing on my mind when I bought it.

My mum has a Dell Latitude from work

I think it's a Sempron (i.e. absolute bottom of the range) not an Intel though.

The build quality is piss poor compared to the Tosh sitting on my desk. The high end Dell laptops seem well made, but the lower end ones are horribly flimsy and plasticky and feel like the lid will snap off when you're opening it.

I find Toshibas to be very well made even down to the £300 entry level models, and for this reason they are my first choice/recommendation of laptop in most situations.

Working laptop

It appears they have produced a laptop for working people, i.e. engineers and tech assistants, not the poncy toy of management. Now all we need is one with a separate numeric keypad, and a second serial port.

Retro

I too have a Tecra A9 on my desk - I hadn't thought much about it's retro looks other than, yes, it's a bit chunky.

It does have a rotary volume control however and, most startling of all, no blue LEDs. How quaint.

If only you got a serial port on a netbook.

As many folk have said here, Serial Ports are damm handy, and although many (all) new networking products allow you to set them up via the network, who in a corporation will plug in an unconfigured router/switch onto there network to set it up? - none thats who.

From my last round of doing network engineering work, I would of killed for somthing like the EEEPC to have serial built in. Because its not high resolution work, its all about can it telnet & charge from your car.

At anyrate, presuming this is aimed at the corporate market, it being ugly makes sence. There is nothing more annoying than an exec that has to much time on there hands deciding that 'that is the laptop I want' because its shiny.

@ Buck Futter

I'll take the one that has the feature set I want, is well made, reliable and has good support available. I couldn't give a flying fuck what it looks like; it's a tool, not a fashion accessory.

Toshiba would be my choice brand of laptop for almost any situation I can think of.

But then I'm one of these engineer types that prizes substance over style every time, some of us are funny like that.

@ AC 11.07

What the hell do you do to the things?!

I've bought approx 60 Tecras of various sizes and model numbers over the last two years and I can't complain about the build quality or reliability at all. Had to RMA two or three for things like a cracked screen, but that's understandable when the user manages to shut their laptop bag in a revolving door/leave it on the roof of their car and drive off etc, don't you love salesmen eh?. Oh and I had a hard drive go bad on another one which was sorted very quickly, can't complain about a mechanical defect on the part of the HDD manufacturer really.

Contrast this to the HPs that the last incumbent of my job went for - myriad problems with screens going fuzzy, fans failing, trackpad buttons and keyboards becoming unusable, hinges going, motherboards dying, network cards 'burning out' (wtf? This is what HP told me)... I know which I'd rather go for.

And for all the people that are going to jump down my throat, we replace laptops on a 2 year cycle so the HPs were of roughly the same age as the Toshibas, it's not that we'd had them for twice as long. They were comparably priced business oriented laptops.

I'd usually hesitate to use anecdotal evidence in support of my claims that x brand is better than y brand, but I've been responsible for supporting 80 odd laptops (only a few of those sodding HPs to get rid of now) so I have a pretty clear idea of which brand caused me more grief.

I guess in your case AC, you must be one of these people that seems to be very heavy on whatever pieces of technology they get given - such users can never explain why they get through twice as many laptops, Bluetooth headsets, mobile phones etc as everyone else, but they must be doing something to the bloody things!