could only be used at near full-charge, which meant that it could only be used a few hours after putting in new batteries. The laptop could function for considerably longer without using the disk drive. The backlight can be manually toggled off to save power by pressing the Control and Caps Lock keys at the same time. An intermediate version, the NC150 Notepad, was also produced, but was available only in Italy and France; its case had the same design as the NC100, but it included the games later seen on the NC200. Variants Both the NC100 and NC200 were licensed to a company called NTS Computer Systems in British Columbia and marketed as the Dreamwriter 100 and Dreamwriter 200, respectively. These were the same computers apart from having only Protext and Personal information manager apps installed (no BBC Basic, no games, and no spreadsheet). The Dreamwriter 200 had a 1.44 MB floppy disk drive, an upgrade from the NC200's 720 KB drive. Its user guide cautions against using the low-density floppy disks. The cases were off-white in color with blue and green stripes separating the screen from the keyboard. There were blue and green colored keys also. The Dreamwriters were retailed by Radio Shack in the U.S. for a short time in the mid-1990s. References External links Tim's Amstrad NC Users' Site How computers should be: Sue Schofield shoulders her Amstrad notebook and takes a Swiss Army knife to the opposition More NC-100 pictures (even internals) NC100 review, 1994 Writer Sue Schofield's page on the NC100 Portable computers Amstrad