I just picked up a new in the box Holley Commander 950-700 cfm 4bbl TBI system for $800. A guy down the street had it and needed the money bad, anyway I was looking on E-bay for a cheap laptop to program it with and just wanted some advice on what was a good rugged one that can be left in the heat of the car and bounced around on the seat and such. Any suggestions? Is a slow 486 or P1 just as good as a faster P2 for programming?

 

there's 2 good approach for this:
- buy a crap low end pentium for cheap. hope it has a good batteries, coz replacing those won't be feasible.
- buy a good one. 6 months to 1 year old. there's a tv-output and the most important thing, those still have com and printer ports. the ports are the must if you're going to do any serious tuning with the laptop.

 

Just bought an old Panasonic CF-25 ToughBook, has a P1 133-CD,FD, it's built to military specs (MIL-STD-810E), just saw a video of it being dropped on concrete from 4 feet and then run over by a Humvee, coffee poured on the keyboard, and it still worked!!