Re: Choosing an HP-48 Message #7 Posted by Dave Britten on 29 Sept 2011, 10:18 a.m., in response to message #1 by E.Lub_EU
Of the units I own, I find that the SX feels sturdier than the G or GX. Either way, it's almost impossible to open one without causing significant cosmetic damage (and possibly functional damage as well).
You can get by with 32 KB, but it's awfully tight if you plan to do any substantial programming, and you can forget about installing any large libraries. Even adding just a 32 KB card to an SX is a huge improvement. A GX with an extra 128 KB card is more than enough if you don't plan to run the heavy-weights like Alg, Erable, Metakernel, etc.
For the SX, the only difference over the S is the addition of the card slots. If you never want to track down cards, then it won't make a difference. For the GX, you get card slots plus 128 KB internal RAM vs 32 KB in the G, but the GX is just a hair slower than the G because it has to do more bank-switching to accommodate the extra RAM. You can still find secondhand RAM cards, but they rarely come cheap.
If you're doing just typical calculation, the S/SX is fine in terms of speed. It's visibly sluggish, mostly in the areas of display updating, but it makes excellent use of a keyboard buffer, so you don't need to be concerned with typing "too fast" for the machine. You can type ahead, and it will wait to update the display until it's finished working. I keep one on my desk for day-to-day use, and have no issues with it. Honestly, the G and GX are still fairly pokey as well.
Also worth mentioning is that there is a library for the S/SX called simply "GX" which adds a lot of the new functions from the GX (mostly list-based stuff). It's just under 2.5 KB.
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