Retro Pocket 386 Win 95 laptop sub $200, comes with 386SX40 processor, 8 MB RAM | Hacker News Reader

Retro Pocket 386 Win 95 laptop sub $200, comes with 386SX40 processor, 8 MB RAM

tomshardware.com

29 pointsflerchin21 comments

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A 486/66 DX2 would be much more interesting.

(With a Voodoo2 12MB and an SB AWE32! :D)

I do remember playing SQIII on a portable 386. It was usable with Win 3.11 but not great.

I wonder if this one is using pirated software, too?

https://nicole.express/2023/book-it.html

Interestingly, the keyboard has neither the W95 Windows key nor the contemporary one, but the XP to W7 era logo on it. Probably originally produced for some netbook from the late 00s, early 10s?

Now I wonder how many warehouses are still full of new old stock netbook parts. :)

386? For Win95, that really should be a 486.

i recall a buddy of mine betting that i couldn't get 95 to run on my 386 which had a full set of 8x1MB RAM sticks. It worked... okish. haha

Yeah, we ran Win95 on a 386 with only 4 MB of RAM, and it worked, but it was not a pleasurable experience.

And now, with a thousand times more RAM, you can get an equally unpleasurable experience running Windows 11 on only 4Gb of RAM.

Could have stopped with "running Windows 11" and had a true comment.

Not looking forward to being forced to upgrade to Win11 with my next CPU upgrade.

Pentium 90 with 32 mb ram at least. 95 was dog slow even on a 486 dx2 66 with 20 mb ram.

Most of the issues with the hardware of the era was the dog-shit slow IDE HDDs and the price of RAM was too high (one reason NT4 wasn't targeted for the home). Move to flash storage, max out RAM, and things get better.

Put this out as a 486 DX2 100 or 120, and I would be all over this like ugly on an ape. Bonus if it came with Voodoo graphics and a Soundblaster card, and 32Mb of RAM.

The embedded video review by RetroTV1 has quite a lot more info and details:

https://youtu.be/wVgITS8aLzc

I wonder if the Windows licences are legit?

Most likely they do not have a license to distribute their product with Windows on it but on 3.11 and 95 the key 111-1111111 is considered legit. Anyone can grab a clean copy from archive.org. Looks like they could have saved future heartaches by pointing the buyers this direction and having them install the image themselves (which I consider part of the charm in retrocomputing).

The cpu has the gpio pins exposed at the back so you can control stuff Arduino style. Fun stuff

The lack of a Sound Blaster (only OPL3 is offered) makes this far less appealing.

I need this. No I don’t , but I want it

Horrible. Why an SX?

This[1] is the system it uses.

Hilariously it is made by nvidia. Well sorta, it seems like at some point nvidia purchased a company that made industrial 386 single board computers. Finally nvidia breaking into the x86 market, hahaha.

[1]: https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/uli-m6117c/

Maybe for one of the key reasons the SX existed in the first place? Because its 16-bit data bus allows it to be used on simpler, smaller, cheaper, mainboard designs (though it wasn't a directly compatible drop-in replacement for 286 chips – there were still extra pins, one or two tens of them IIRC).

Maybe they found stock of those for reasonable price somewhere...

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