"A laptop NEW in 1990? Did they HAVE laptops in 1990? Surely not with a 4.5Gb hard drive, they didn't have gigabites back then. And not one capable of being upgraded to XP Pro.

Oh yes they did, an IBM Thinkpad 390x, and it has been running XP for the last 3 years - amazingly fast when unhindered by a virus checker!