Retrocomputing: Prostar Laptops

This ad from the March 2001 issue of Computer Shopper features laptops from a company called Prostar. I'm not familiar with their machines but apparently they were around for quite a while but alas no more. At least not as an independent company. One of the first links I found when doing a search was a press release announcing the merger of Prostar and Sager.

According to this info, Prostar was founded in 1992. I don't see a specific date on the announcement but there is a Prostar copyright date on the bottom of 2022 so I assume that's around the time of the merger. It looks like the combined company goes by the name of Sager, probably because that is the better known brand between the two.

While I'm not familiar with Prostar, I am familiar with Sager (though I've never owned one of their machines). I think I first heard of them a long time ago when they used to produce Alienware's laptops back before Alienware was purchased by Dell. I think Sager has produced laptops for a number of different vendors over the years though I think their laptops were themselves basically rebadged Clevo models. I believe that Prostar may also have based their machines on Clevo models so in that sense I guess the merger makes a lot of...sense. In the past, Sager laptops have generally been considered to be fairly high quality though I don't know if that is still true or if this merger affected that. Sager was among the first companies to produce laptops specifically designed for gaming, as was Prostar (though I guess in reality it may have really just been Clevo, lol).

Back to Prostar...this ad contains various laptop models that the company offered at the time. All are Pentium III based (800MHz or 866MHz), have RAM ranging from 64MB to 128MB, 6GB to 10GB hard drives, and either integrated video or ATI Rage Pro 3D video, and a 13.3" XGA Active Matrix Display or 14.1" XGA Active Matrix Display. The price range is not huge and for some odd reason there isn't a model listed here that combines the fastest CPU with the best video option. Perhaps it was a power/heat thing. The prices range from $1495 to $1895. It looks like there are two models with two version of each model. Model 2253 has the faster processor and integrated graphics and Model 3153 has the slower processor and discrete graphics. Both models come with either a 13.3" or 14.1" screen. Oddly, the smaller screen version of the 3153 comes with 64 MB of RAM while all of the others come with 128 MB though it is also the cheapest. At a glance, I didn't find any reviews of these systems so I'm not sure how they compared to similar systems by other companies. However, if like Sager these were really based on Clevo models then I would think quality would be basically identical.

So, has anybody out there ever owned a Prostar laptop? How about a Sager or a Cleo? I've never had any of those though I've always kind of wanted one of the Sager models that corresponded to the Alienware models they were producing back in the day.

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