Good low cost laptop for embedded work?

Hi Rob,

>The Dell group that handles leased laptops has an eBay store where they sell 
>factory reconditioned Dell laptops.  I have bought a couple and they seem 
>quite nice.  Not as cheap as you might get a laptop elsewhere but I was 
>comforted by the fact they have been reworked by Dell technicians.
>
>Perhaps you can find a year or two old model that still has parallel and 
>serial ports.
>  
>

Thanks. I didn't know that they sell lease returns on EBay. I looked 
around a bit. Seems like they are mostly close to or past warranty 
expiration. But it is a bit tedious to find out whether they have a 
parallel port. When I keyed in the respective service tags it only shows 
a brief configuration list. With test equipment that's different since I 
always keep some old HP catalogs ;-)

Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com

> I don't use one, but I think it's VERY unlikely. The parallel port
JTAG
> programmers work by direct bit- poking; you'll usually find they come

> with an access- protection- defeating driver such as giveio, Port95
etc.

In theory, the USB devices COULD come with a VDD that would fully
virtualize the parallel port to the I/O level. In practice, they don't.
It may be that a few such devices do come with fully-implemented
drivers, but they certainly don't advertise the feature.

> I don't use one, but I think it's VERY unlikely. The parallel port
JTAG
> programmers work by direct bit- poking; you'll usually find they come

> with an access- protection- defeating driver such as giveio, Port95
etc.

In theory, the USB devices COULD come with a VDD that would fully
virtualize the parallel port to the I/O level. In practice, they don't.
It may be that a few such devices do come with fully-implemented
drivers, but they certainly don't advertise the feature.

> I don't use one, but I think it's VERY unlikely. The parallel port
JTAG
> programmers work by direct bit- poking; you'll usually find they come

> with an access- protection- defeating driver such as giveio, Port95
etc.

In theory, the USB devices COULD come with a VDD that would fully
virtualize the parallel port to the I/O level. In practice, they don't.
It may be that a few such devices do come with fully-implemented
drivers, but they certainly don't advertise the feature.

Hi Lewin,

>In theory, the USB devices COULD come with a VDD that would fully
>virtualize the parallel port to the I/O level. In practice, they don't.
>It may be that a few such devices do come with fully-implemented
>drivers, but they certainly don't advertise the feature.
>  
>

If they do I wonder why they don't advertise. Besides not being able to 
run a JTAG programmer like the MSP430 FET on a USB to parallel converter 
there are going to be lots of folks in much more dire straits: Those 
with the dreaded dongles, especially on legacy software that for 
whatever reason needs to be kept going. Those folks might some day be 
frantically looking for used laptops that still have a real parallel port.

Regards, Joerg

http://www.analogconsultants.com