Buy these machines and get a great timing PC with a serial port, USB ports, 14" great XVGA screen, ultra bay with CDRW and small enough to carry without hassle.
PST prefers Windows 2000 for timing and scoring. If you must use XP professional.
IBM reconditoned machines are the best value going in our opinion. Buy now as machines with native serial ports are going fast.
Our favorite machine now is used T-30 with XP Pro. Small footprint and is the last model with a serial port. Only wish is that the 2 usb ports were 2.0 and not 1.1 usb. The transfer rate really bites with the older USB ports if you are using an external hard drive.
For a new machine try a Dell Inspiron 600m. The only new machine from any manufacturer that I could find with a native serial port. Also has two usb 2.0 along with a paralell port, s-video, db15 VGA, and pcimcia slot gives us all we need. We own a 04 and a 05 version and are happy with both. I believe PST owns one also (super J).
Posts: 284 | Location: Telluride, CO, USA | Registered: October 25, 2002
Stay away from the large-screen Dells. Dell uses some wild & funky video resolutions (unique to Dell) on their extraordinarily squat laptop displays, and then they attempt to diddle the OS to attempt to proportionally re-size characters and standard forms. Yuck. It's a mess.
