From: Eric Engle (engleerica_at_yahoo.com)
Date: Thu Feb 16 2006 - 09:57:09 PST
Ok, I cannot resist. I own a wallstreet, and one reason for getting it was my newton.
Like any laptop, these things are built to very tight (low) tolerances. The get hot and eventually break.
They have the following known (planned?) defects:
Hinge springs on the screen breaking (just like emates...)
power cable not well soldered
for some reason the power manager on mine acts like static is bothering it (or gremlins or something).
That being said there are some real advantages:
You can load it with 2 batteries and actually use it for a while unplugged.
It has a floppy drive. I'm sorry steve, they aren't obsolete.
The floppy, cd, and batterys can be removed, swapped, cusotomized.
No usb port but a usb adapter card works, at least for usb sticks.
I have not gotten the usb card to work with an external hard drive though.
The real advantage to this machine is its ports. A serial port (mini din 9 i do believe), an IR port, a scsi port and 2 pcmcia ports. I've never gotten the IR port to work but I haven't had to either.
I don't know how to install OSX on it. Or what, if anything, to get the IR port to talk to my newton.
All in all its worth a couple hundred on ebay, IF you make sure that the doors not broken, the cable to the screen (easily accessible) is properly seated (mine wasn't easy repair, no welding involved) and the power cable in the machine is not broken. Treat it gently and it seems to be fairly sold (though my lion batteries died, completely, no resetting of the machine or firmware reboot or any other deep voodoo has brough them back - one week, an hours worth of power, at least, the next, zilch). Also my disk drive needs to be repaired, and unfortunately it uses a six sided screw. Though, if you have the driver, it disassembles easily and is not impossible to put back into one piece.
Yeah, i'd buy it again, but only because I'm still to cheap to buy a tablet pc and was still wanting os 9 for my newton and hypercard.
Does OSX run terribly slowly? Does installing OSX require wiping the hard drive clean? One other reason I got it is it has useful licensed software.
Anyway if anyone knows how to get a USB hard drive to run on a wallstreet os 9 tell me, or where there are OS X instructions (supposedly the hdd would be autorecognized under osx. I want to believe).
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