Hey everyone, it's Colin, how's it going?
It's common to find laptops that are thin and light these days, but this wasn't always the case.
Stick around and we'll take a look at a vintage Subnotebook that feels oddly familiar.
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This is a Toshiba Portégé 3110CT. It was released in late 1999 at a time when laptops were becoming more mainstream.
It was targeted at so-called "road warriors" where portability was paramount.
You got a mobile Pentium 2 processor at 300 megahertz and 64 megabytes of PC133 memory, which could be upgraded to a maximum of 192.
It also came with a 6.4 gigabyte UDMA3 hard drive, with your choice of Windows 98 or NT 4 preinstalled.
What made the 3110 a subnotebook is that it was smaller in every dimension than typical laptops of its era.
At only ten inches wide by eight and a half inches deep, it was just plain little.
And you could tell while using it.
It's 800x600 pixel screen resolution was typical, but it was crammed into a ten inch LCD panel.
The keyboard was smaller than usual, which took some getting used to,
but it still never felt comfortable to type on for long periods.
And even the socket for the power adapter was absurdly small and delicate.
But just because it was smaller in size, didn't mean it skimped on features.
On the left side was the jack for the built-in 56K modem and a PCMCIA expansion card slot.
On the right was audio, a USB 1.0 port, and an infrared transceiver,
which was most often used to sync data with PDAs.
Behind a flip-down door was the last two ports: One for the floppy drive and one for the included docking station.
Because the machine was so small, there wasn't enough room for all the other typical ports,
so that docking station became pretty important.
It offered serial, parallel, PS/2, and VGA ports, as well as another audio jack and USB port.
There was also an RJ-45 jack for 10/100 Ethernet networking.
Due to power and heat limitations, the 3110 was never able to offer the best performance.
That Pentium 2 was a bit underwhelming,
but did allow the machine to get about three hours of battery life, which was average at the time.
Likewise, the Trident graphics chip with 2½ megabytes of video memory, made it a poor choice for gaming.
Though at least the LCD screen was a high quality active matrix panel.
Also owing to its small size, there was no built-in removable storage.
The floppy drive was included, but external.
A Panasonic CD-ROM drive was a common accessory and connected through the PCMCIA card slot.
And while this made for a pretty messy desk if you needed to use 'em, it did mean this laptop was attractive to business travelers.
The machine was only about ¾ths of an inch thick and weighed 3 pounds, both of which are pretty respectable numbers even for today's devices.
Of course, that portability came at a price:
$2300 US in 1999.
That's equivalent to $3300 in 2016.
But the price wasn't such a big deal.
This wasn't the kind of machine you'd buy yourself.
Rather, since it was targeted for business use, you'd get your employer to buy it for you.
Is the Portégé still useful these days?
Of course not.
Though I should note how impressed I am with Toshiba's support.
At the time when I filmed this, not only did the company's website still offer the spec sheet, but all of the drivers as well.
So while it's thoroughly obsolete, this could be a fun laptop for exploring retro computing.
It's probably not the best choice if your goal is 3D gaming,
but for most everything else, it just goes to show that size doesn't necessarily matter.
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and as always, thanks for watching.