Technology evolves at such an incredible rate today, and things change so fast that it is difficult to know what is best today... because tomorrow it will be different. We are a very conservative company and take what we recommend very seriously.
Hosts have for years told us they wanted a laptop because of its portability. So, we searched for months, then took everything we found about Laptops and researched only the best solutions. We wanted backup for our customers, so a dual drive was very important to us. We wanted internal mounted drives so you don't have to carry an external USB or Firewire box also. That defeats the "portability" of a laptop. We could not find a CDG thin-line capable CDR/CDROM drive, so we have been hand modifying a different thin-line model. This has become more than we are willing to continue doing. Thus, we could no longer offer a CDR internally mounted in a Laptop. The newer CDR/CDROM product we expected to replace our "hand modified" one did not materialize. Alas, a disappointment to us.
I noticed in another post today that someone has ordered a 5400rpm drive for his laptop. These are discontinued drives, and only 4200rpm drives are available as new manufactured parts. This was another reason we decided to stop selling laptops. The technology has been "over-promoted". It is appearing the standard hard drives are just not capable of sustained audio show performance. The data we reviewed is not being substantiated by our actual experiences with the laptops. Also, the audio quality has not been a major concern for laptop manufacturers, and we are displeased with the variable quality we receive.
I hope this sheds some light on the subject. We have a number of clients who are very pleased with their laptops, and we will continue to support them the best we can. However, the new Hoster PC Portable system offers far more options for us, higher quality and standard faster peripherals. Our cost is significantly lower, which we pass on to you. This is very good for KJs on a low-hardware budget.
