UPDATE: I’ve got this working, so despite this post being a day old it should be considered hysterical. I mean, historical. Freudian slip.
I’ll post in more detail as soon as I’m finished.
Tuesday 10th November 2009
Thursday 03rd September 2009
It may come as complete shock to you to find out our first home computer from the early 1990s was a DOS machine. Certainly I’ve never mentioned this ever before on my blog here (cough!), and I certainly have never blogged about running DOS on modern hardware for nostalgic fun.
Turns out one of the unintended positives of procuring a ThinkPad X40 dating back to before IBM’s hardware division was purchased by Lenovo is that IBM were themselves a DOS vendor (an oversimplification of history but it’ll suffice) and supported running DOS well after everyone else jumped on the Windows bandwagon.
What this means is even for a 2004 vintage notebook computer from their download page they have complete DOS software for updating the BIOS and diagnosing problems along with drivers for networking, external optical drives, sound and their obscure, limited run USB grilled cheese sandwich waffle irons that came bundled with I’m so full of crap.
I’m stretched for time as is and probably won’t be able to test any of this out for a while, but I do have a licenced copy of IBM PC DOS 7 and a ThinkPad with drivers… it might be time to get my nostalgia freak on :).
Wednesday 19th August 2009
I’m gonna pop a cap in your… nah I can never pull off gangsta.
Depending on your attitude you either think the TrackPoint mouses between the keys on ThinkPads are either fantastic or dreadful. I love them, I’ve always been far more accurate with them than with trackpads or those trackballs older notebooks had. With all the multitouch gestures Apple now bundles with their laptop trackpads it’s doubtful I’ll ever get to use a TrackPoint mouse on a Mac, but I’m enjoying the experience again on my second hand ThinkPad X40.
Not only that, but as a *nix user I also love having three dedicated buttons which lets me copy and paste text in terminals as well as having the usual right click menus. Look at the mouse go! Click! Whoosh! Zoom! Blaz! Blaz?
Anyway because I got this machine second hand I quickly wanted to replace the gungy TrackPoint cap. You can buy a set of replacement TrackPoint caps from Lenovo but they’re a whopping $25 so I went on eBay and picked up a set for a couple of bucks from a friendly guy in Melbourne.
The little bag of caps (product ID 73P2698) come with three different styles you can choose: the classic dome, soft dome and a concave soft rim. All three are great but I prefer the concave soft rim (top right in the photo I took above) because it fits the shape of my finger and I can apply much more pivoting force with less effort. By pushing on the edges I can also accurately move the cursor just one pixel in any direction with no effort at all. It’s a beautiful thing.
If someone made an aftermarket TrackPoint mouse for Apple notebooks I would buy one in a heartbeat! I’d forgotten how much I love them.
Tuesday 18th August 2009
I’m typing this post as we speak on my second hand IBM ThinkPad X40 and I have to say I’m thrilled with it! While obviously larger in dimensions than a netbook, I just can’t get over how light it is. I put it in my bag I usually haul my 15 inch MacBook Pro in along with my folder of study papers and as I carried it to the Boatdeck for my morning cup of coffee the bag felt like there was only the folder in it!
The machine currently has Windows XP Professional installed and even has the genuine OEM licence sticker on it. Given I’m not sure how much Windows software I’ll need to run for my studies in the future I’ve decided to shrink the Windows partition and put FreeBSD on it with a boot menu.
The main thing I was worried about was the tiny 1.8″ ZIF PATA hard drive, I had read plenty of stories by people claiming the 4800RPM drive is noisy and has slow seek times but it booted XP pretty quickly and loading applications didn’t seem to take too long at all. Given this is a second hand machine I will be running SpinRite on the drive before I put any data onto it to triple check that it’s functioning properly.
Even if the internal drive turns out to be working flawlessly, once I’ve got a bit more money I will be looking into a replacement if only to protect myself against errors that I can’t see right now. 1.8″ ZIF PATA drives are uncommon but not too difficult to find, 60GB Samsung drives seem to be going for around $80. Another option is Amazon.com stocks 1.8″ ZIF PATA 16GB SLC drives for US$140 which is way too steep for my budget but could be something I get in the distant future if I still have this machine.
As for the other features, I’ve been using it lightly for half an hour and the bundled battery still reports a 90% charge which is pleasantly surprising! I was also able to connect to our WPA2 secured AirPort WiFi network at home without any problems, the next thing to test will be whether it can use my university’s VPN.
I don’t intend to spend much money on this machine but I did pick up a few replacement mouse stick caps for a couple of bucks, and a 12.1″ screen protector for another few bucks at the Mawson Lakes Apple shop of all places.
I got me a ThinkPad netbook! Boo yah!
Saturday 15th August 2009
WARNING: Excessive computer use can colour your eyes a scary bright cyan… apparently!
After just over a year of searching online, offline and everywhere in between (subspace?) I finally managed to procure myself an IBM ThinkPad X40 and USB powered IBM combo drive in excellent condition for less than AU$300 from an Adelaideian. When you consider they sold for over AU$3,000 new less than four years ago paying 10% is pretty gosh darn good!
This model of ThinkPad X40 was part of IBM’s executive/premium/expensive ultraportable X notebook series in 2005 and it still has fairly respectable specs: a 12 inch screen, 1.4GHz Pentium M with Centrino b/g wireless, a gigabit ethernet port, 1,280 MiB of PC2700 RAM, CardBus slot, two USB 2.0 ports, a 60GB internal 1.8″ drive and one of those cool three button (hooray for using with FreeBSD!) TouchPoint mouses. It’s slightly heavier than a netbook but has an infinitely better keyboard and… it’s a ThinkPad!
Despite otherwise being an Apple guy, ever since I saw my dad’s machines from work over the course of a decade I’ve been a fan of ThinkPads. They’re not sexy like MacBooks, but I think they’re classy and their build quality is absolutely without peer. I do love my MacBook Pro with OS X, but I have to say I’ve been tempted by a ThinkPad with FreeBSD, Xubuntu (or OpenSolaris if I could get it working!) for a very long time.
Coincidently, the X40 also holds the (dubious depending on your standing) distinction of being the last notebook designed and sold by IBM before Lenovo bought their consumer hardware division. The end of an era as it were.
Two related thoughts: If I needed to run some more Windows software for uni, I wonder if it’d run Windows 7 acceptably in a partition too? Might need to ask Nick Hodge on The Twitters. And I wonder how its performance would compare to the current netbooks too. It has an older, slower hard drive not an SSD but I’d have to think an older Pentium M would still outperform an Atom… maybe… maybe not.
Tuesday 09th October 2007
The DFE-670TXD is a mysterious little ethernet card, because it’s turned my old ThinkPad 600E into a very picky eater. With this card plugged into either of the PC Card slots:
- My beloved FreeBSD installs, but throws errors upon booting despite the fact the very card is named and supported in
/etc/defaults/pccard.conf - NetBSD not only refuses to install, but just reboots the machine before it’s even finished booting of the CD-ROM
- My Linux distro of choice Slackware detects and installs the card, but upon using it after installing the base system, the entire system hangs forcing a hard reset
Curiously, the only operating system which installed and detected the card perfectly was… OpenBSD! I have no idea what OpenBSD is doing differently, but booting of the CD and going through the installer the card is detected automatically. When I reboot the machine with OpenBSD installed, I can use the internet, share files on the local network and synchronise with time servers without any problems!
FreeBSD is my operating system of choice generally, but OpenBSD for some reason which completely baffles me right now is the only one that works. I’m completely baffled. Did I mentioned I’m baffled? Bamboozled? Anyone with knowledge on how OpenBSD drivers work know why or have any theories?
In any case I guess I’d better brush up on the OpenBSD FAQs, because I have an OpenBSD machine now!
