As an engineer, the Dell Inspiron-8200 was my favorite laptop. It was fast enough to run most software (running under XP), and it had parallel and serial ports. Parallel ports are great for general digital IO. They have 8 Output lines and 5 Input lines. Later laptops lost legacy ports, so I used to always carry PC cards with COM and LPT ports to allow me access to legacy hardware.
The modern laptop is so small and light that it can no longer connect to external devices and does everything ‘practical’.
While I still require a laptop to connect to different systems using RS232 and RS485, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find anything that has ‘engineering connectivity’ without having to have a lot of adapter cards or interface ‘dongles’.
I keep the Inspiron (dual-boot Windows 98/XP) for legacy stuff. It’s a PIC programr, but it won’t work well with a USB LPT converter. It needs traditional (&H378) IO addresses.