🚀 go-pugleaf

Somewhere on teh intarwebs Mark P. Nelson wrote:
> Man, you do not need any more coffee!

Heh! ThinkPads are something I'm passionate about so I tend to get a bit 
verbose and bellicose when I write about them.

> I wish I had your expertise in the laptop world. I always avoided
> them as overpriced toys, when real men used towers, and that's what
> I've always built.

I was the same until a couple years ago, building gaming rigs for mates as 
well as my own. Then I started to think about the fact that I was fitting 
PSUs with ratings between 700 and 1,000 watts and graphics cards that could 
double as leaf-blowers, sometimes two in a box!

Electricity keeps going up in price, I'm on a low fixed income and I 
realised that I was surrounded my machines that were pulling ~250w while I 
was just reading newsgroups. Consequently I did my research, spoke to some 
friends in the IT world about makes of laptop etcetera and the unanimous 
consensus was T-series ThinkPads are the best (with an honourable mention to 
the R51s and R52s from around '05), even though some of the guy's employers 
had changed to using Dell, much to the disgust of the IT folks. Dell have 
adopted an extremely aggressive pricing and support regime for corporates 
here of late, getting a lot of customers who were loyal to IBM but unsure of 
Lenovo.

As for my 'expertise', that's all down to the fact that there is excellent 
documentation in the form of 'hardware maintenance manuals' available on 
IBM's site as well as communities of others passionate about ThinkPads. 
Check out http://forum.thinkpads.com/ , those guys *really* know their 
stuff. Also http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/ThinkWiki is a handy resource.

Any other brand of laptop I deal with it's just a matter of taking my time 
and not getting impatient if it won't come apart, looking for hidden screws 
or plastic tabs (they don't go back together well if you break those off). 
Also Google is your friend. I've found a few user-documented disassembly 
guides with pictures for different models and makes.

It's my opinion that desktops are going to (continue to) become increasingly 
rare, reduced to gamers rigs and small business servers. I reckon in 10 
years most people will have forgotten what they look like or why they used 
such monsterous things.

I still have a Socket 775 tower machine with a 45nm C2D (that I'll upgrade 
to one of the best quads I can afford when they're cheaper) that has four 
really neat front-loading SATA HDD bays that take a bare drive and are 
hot-swappable (and I have USB 'docks' for SATA HDDs hooked up to my 
ThinkPads docking stations). It doesn't get turned on often though, mainly 
to move data between my stack of HDDs as it's *way* faster doing it via SATA 
than it is via USB. 3.5" HDDs are by far the cheapest option per GB for 
storage still and likely will be for a while so it makes sense to use them.

Oh, if I have a big batch of video that needs transcoding I use the 'heavy 
iron' for that as it's faster at processing than the T60 and much faster 
accessing the 3.5" HDDs. That's why I'll ultimately put a quad core in it, 
for the raw grunt for the rare times that I need it rather than tying the 
laptop up. (I can get a Q6600 relatively cheaply but would like to hold out 
for a 45nm processor, preferably one with a lot of L2. They're still quite 
expensive for now.

> I have had or maintained for PHBs a few laptops over the years, and I
> always thought they sacrificed too much just to lose weight.

This Sony Viao I have here is an extreme example of that. It has the same 
'grunt' as my T60 but is half the weight and you just know that if you 
dropped it, even from a metre onto carpet, that it would disintegrate. There 
are most certainly laptops and then there are laptops....

> When
> Lenovo bought the IBM laptop business, I also figured it was the end
> for the brand.

Lenovo were basically making ThinkPads for IBM under strict supervision for 
a few years before the takeover and there were quite a few IBM designers 
in-house. When IBM divested itself of it's laptop and desktop business' the 
formerly-IBM team stayed with Lenovo so, by and large, it's still the same 
team designing (some of) the laptops. Also IBM still hold rights to the 
'ThinkPad' name and have set rules for it's use, hence Lenovo bringing out 
their own 'IdeaPad' range. (IBM adopted the slogan "Think!" in the 1920s and 
registered it / patented it (?) around the late 1940's. It was one of the 
first slogans to be patented [sorry, no cites right now] so they're not 
going to let it get dragged into the gutter at this late stage.)

Basically so far and for the near future at least the T series of ThinkPads 
are still a good bet. I can't vouch for Lenovo's own model lines (they sell 
millions of laptops in China) or even the non-T series ThinkPads (I hear 
they're perhaps slipping a bit although the ThinkPad reputation is a hard 
one to live up to).

> Perhaps I have been wrong.

Yes and no. Some of the Lenovo ThinkPad range are distinctly 'for the 
masses' (as were some of the IBM ThinkPads, but perhaps to a lesser extent) 
however the T series remains the flagship and as such is still an excellent 
machine.

> Thanks for your thoughts.

Heh! Thanks for reading. I'm pleased that I wasn't just talking to myself, I 
do enough of that in RL. <g>
-- 
Shaun.

"When we dream.... that's just our brains defragmenting" G Jackson.