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July 08, 2004
Mail Call
Subject: sve: whitebox
From: Jan Swijsen
Date: Thu, 8 Jul 2004 13:14:05 +0200<quote>The first kink in the armor, however, may be the line of white-box laptops by Asus </quote>
Umm, I don't think they were first.
I bought my first notebook somewhere in 1996. A Mitac (AMD486/100) but there was no Mitac label (other than the serial-number sticker) on the box. There was no real manual either, just a stapled stack of leaves with the pictures each on a separate leave.
At the time Mitac produced lots of notebooks on order for relative[ly] small brands, lots of small desktop firms were branching out into notebooks. The notebook had a few cutouts in the plastic caseing where the companies could fix brand name labels to it.
The advantage was that I could easily and relative[ly] cheaply upgrade the standard memory (from the 1MB to 4MB) without using the single expansion slot (which took another 16MB later). I also upgraded the disk from a standard 120MB to a generous 800MB (now there is a 2GB disk installed).
I admit that those Mitacs were not directly available to the public, I got mine from a reseller (low price but no warranty).
-- Kind regards,
Sjon Svenson
Date: Thu, 08 Jul 2004 06:37:11 -1000
From: Dan Seto
To: Jan SwijsenI guess what they are saying is you can buy the case without memory, hard drive, or CPU. This is not the same as being able to increase memory or switch the hard drive. Whether you save any money doing it this way I don't know, but at least you control what goes in - not the manufacturer.
Aloha!
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