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Michal H. Tyc
My computer systems
If you would like to know what machines I am using most often to develop my programs, you can take a look at the reports created with 'System Speed Test', which is available from our Links page.
In 2002 I had a chance
to buy a Toshiba Satellite 300CDS notebook
manufactured in 1997. It needed some fixing, as the previous owner damaged
it by applying a beer bath 
— it was completely dead, but now works
quite well. Soon I enhanced it by adding a PCMCIA 10 Mbit/s Ethernet
adapter.
This machine seems to have a bad luck. In 2005 we both suffered in an accident: I broke my leg and the notebook lost its LCD screen. I managed to buy another display (unfortunately, with somewhat worse picture quality) and replace the damaged one. The next part to replace is the battery, which is significantly worn out.
Even though the
12" DSTN LCD does not provide as much comfort as modern TFT panels,
my Satellite is still good for typesetting
TeX documents, email, FTP,
viewing simpler Web pages and, of course, software development with
assemblers and Pascal, C or FORTRAN compilers.
Most often, it runs
under DR-DOS
7.03, but it has Italian Toshiba OEM version of Windows 95 installed
as well (I have also user's manual for the notebook in Italian, even
though its keyboard layout is British). This multi-boot configuration is
set up with our BOOTMGR boot
manager.
In the beginning of 2006, while waiting for replacement LCD for my Satellite notebook, I bought a Compaq Evo N600c notebook. It is now my main machine, as the Satellite became too old for my needs not related to DOS programming. I really like its display and keyboard, as well as the modest design.
Regrettably, although I have chosen a notebook with COM and LPT ports and a selectable bay floppy drive to ease the use of DOS, now I rarely boot to DOS on it, most often using DOS applications through NTVDM.
Of course, I always try to test my programs on as many other machines as possible, either under various versions of MS Windows, or booting to DOS using a floppy, if possible.
Page last modified on March 24, 2008.
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