I'm going to do the unthinkable: throw out a working notebook tomorrow. An NEC Versa SX from 1999. Running Fedora Core 1. Pentium 2 @ 233MHz 256M of RAM 10G HDD [an upgrade from something considerably smaller] Video: Trident Cyber 9388 Screen: 1024x768. No built-in networking (that's what PCcards are for). Swappable bay for CD writer and floppy drive (I have both). Came with a Windows NT 3.5 license (if I remember correctly). but with Win98 installed. The video is a problem: it is only "TrueColor": 16 bits/pixel. The X driver has a long-standing bug where at each power-on the video might be in a state where the colours are screwed up. The only cure is to power cycle. The fundamental problem is that X doesn't know how to fully initialize the device. Kind of 50/50, if I remember correctly. I'm playing with it now. The screen is bright and clear. I quite like the feel of the keyboard. There is a constant fan noise. The machine was quite nice for its day but things are mostly better now. I bought this 17 years ago, lets say 8 doublings by Moore's law. Current nice notebooks vs this: RAM: 16G (2^6 better) SSD/HDD: 256G vs 10G (2^5 more capacity but a lot faster) HDD/HDD: 2T vs 3.2G (2^10 more capacity and a bit faster) screen: 3200x1800 vs 1024x768 (2^3 better) CPU: 2.4GHz vs 233MHz (2^3 faster clock but more instructions/second too) So: Growth is impressive but Moore's law doesn't seem to have applied.