Thinking of...xbox vs laptop

Laptop requirements

We have reports of people running DSMLink acceptably on a P100 with 24megs of RAM. A laptop like this can be had for less than $100 on E-Bay. Preferrably, though, you'll want to locate a laptop with a little more meat to it. Our suggested minimum platform would be a P233 with at least 32meg of RAM running Win98. You'll be very happy with that setup.

The only other major requirement of the laptop is that it provide an RS232, DB9 serial interface of some sort. Almost all older laptops include this, but there are some newer ultra-thin laptops these days that do not. Be sure that you have some way of getting a DB9 serial port out of the laptop before committing to it. We have had reports of PCMCIA serial port adapters working well on laptops that do not have built-in serial ports. Also, the USB to DB9 devices seem to work fine as well. We have not verified this ourselves, but a number of our users report both solutions to work seemlessly. DB25 to DB9 converters plugged into the printer port will *NOT* work.

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