Last year I picked up a second hand ThinkPad X40 for a ridiculously cheap price, and this afternoon I finally got around to adding more memory. In a Department of Obviousness exclusive, it made an already stunningly awesome machine ever better!
Sunday 30th May 2010
Tuesday 30th March 2010
Each morning I get out of bed, check batteries, have a shower, check batteries, brush my teeth, check batteries. While going through this morning’s ritual I stopped dead in my tracks, not because I had run out of battery power, but because of a realisation: I don’t own these batteries, these batteries own me.
Wednesday 25th November 2009
Merlin Mann from 42 + 1 folders once suggested in a podcast that if you want to apply yourself too some creative writing you should start typing and refuse to use the backspace key; just pretend it’s not there. I’m far to obsessive compulsive to follow this advice verbatim because typos freak me out like breakfast cereal without soy milk, but that compulsion aside I’m going to give it a try.
Thursday 19th November 2009
Given I didn’t have any exams today, I took a break from studying for a couple of hours and installed the final release of Fedora 12 that was released yesterday. So far so good, I torrented the i386 DVD image and installed it on my ThinkPad with no problems at all.
Thursday 12th November 2009
After doing some more experimenting with the unstable release of Debian, I so royally messed up my ThinkPad I decided to wipe it clean and start again! For a change and given 12 is coming in 6 days, I thought I’d try out Fedora. So far I’m impressed. Now if only it could take screenshots and go on standby…!
Tuesday 10th November 2009
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.
Saturday 19th September 2009
- IBM PC DOS 2000!
- FreeBSD 7.2 + Xfce
- FreeBSD 7.2 + Gnome
- Windows XP SP3
- Debian Lenny + Gnome
- Windows 7 RC
My relative subjective view of sluggishness/performance on a ThinkPad X40. Shorter bars are better.
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 :).
Monday 24th August 2009
I won’t be giving up Xfce on my FreeBSD desktop any time soon, but Gnome on my ThinkPad X40 keeps finding new ways to surprise me. Its a beautiful thing, and its free!
This might be an old feature, but its one I’ve found wildly useful: the ability to set locations in the panel clock. Other desktops let you do this, but it’s all the little extras that Gnome does. Perhaps KDE 4.2 does, I haven’t had the chance to try yet.
When you define a series of locations they appear on a map of the world complete with an approximate night/day cast. Under the map each location is shown with digital and analogue clocks, and what I’ve found absolutely brilliant is each timezone is displayed relative to where you are, NOT to GMT! For example I can see Singapore is 1:30 behind us here in Adelaide, and Jim Kloss is 17:30 behind.
By default it’s turned off, but if you use Gnome click the clock on your panel and click Locations.
Saturday 22nd August 2009
I know I’ve posted about it far too much, but I just have to post one more time about my experiences with this amazing little machine.
It’s been over a week since I installed Debian Lenny on my newly bought second hand ThinkPad X40 and it’s exceeded all my expectations. I honestly have not been as impressed with a non-Mac piece of hardware for years. It’s extremely lightweight, has a fantastic full keyboard and despite having an old battery I still get 3+ hours with the screen set to full brightness and WiFi on. I’ve literally walked into lectures and tutorials at uni with just this machine which has been such a tremendous relief on my back compared to lugging my 15″ MacBook Pro. It’s light, solidly built and it’s 1.4GHz Pentium M with a scant 512MiB of memory perform far above what I expected.
As an Xfce user on FreeBSD the other thing I’ve been surprised by is how much I’m enjoying Gnome 2.26. The problem is I tend to use FreeBSD on older machines and servers so Gnome has always been overkill but it works beautifully even on this older hardware. The built in graphical tools allow me to update software, configure wireless networks and even have true composting video effects which means I can have translucent menubars and all that cool stuff. The system also boots up quickly and standby works. It’s almost feels as if IBM shipped me this ThinkPad with the software preinstalled.
I am still primarily a Mac guy, but I must admit I’m tempted at some point when I decide to replace my MacBook Pro to spend the same amount of money on a brand new ThinkPad and put Debian or FreeBSD on it. If Debian with one of the heaviest *nix desktop environments performs this amazingly well on a four year old machine, imagine how well it would run on a current one! It’d be stunning!
Having used Macs I cringe at the very sight of so many nasty, horribly flimsy, cheap and plastic PC laptops being passed off as well designed and expensive (not to even start on the budget craptops) but my dad always said his ThinkPads were fantastic machines and now that I have a tiny one of my own I can honestly say I see the appeal.
