[ltp] OK, an even better option might have emerged...

[Zoki]

Le 14/10/2003 07:25, « Michelle Klein-Hass » <bosslady@msgeek.com> a écrit :

> OK, what does everyone think of the A22E? This would be a Celeron 800
> version. How Linux friendly is this laptop?


*** I owned one, then sold it to a girlfriend to buy an iBook.

It's as Linux "friendly" as any Thinkpad. It kind of works but it doesn't
leave you with an excited feeling of owning something special. It's low end
and it doesn't hide it.

It has one PCMCIA slot which you will use for a PCMCIA modem as IBM's is a
winmodem. It has 2 RAM slots but doesn't accept 512 modules. You will have a
modem and a ethernet connector but thoose work only if you buy a modem or
network adapter PCI module. You can't have both at the same time. Most of
the time the previous owner will have bought the modem card.

Sleeping and hibarnating newer worked for me, either with IBM's/MS's Win98
or W2k OS or Linux for that matter.

The HD is mounted on a tray and interchangable within seconds. That's
probably, with the keyboard, the best thing about this laptop.

It holds either a CD, DVD, CD-RW player  or a floppy drive. It's called
Ultrabay and it can also hold a zip drive/2nd harddisk. The 2nd harddisk
isn't bootable so don't think about having 2 80Gb disks for 2 different
systems. To say it right away, the last issue is typical lowend PC crap.

It has one USB port, together with other standard PC ports and like all PC
laptop's it's behind the screen so you'll be doing gymnastics to plug
whatever devices you have.

It should've had potential if it wasn't for IBM's abusive pricing (at least
here in France) and no extended dealer network. It took me 3 months to get a
battery replacement, I stopped looking for other accessories when I found
out the prices of Ultrabay components.

The Celeron CPU is slow, slow... slow! It's not a mobile CPU so the
ventilator works almost all the time and it gives you 1,5 to 2 hours on a
fully charged battery. Compared to 3,5 hours I have today...

In all it was a huge disappointment which helped me decide to buy an iBook.
I paied 450$ for a second hand TP A22e, 197$ for a Li-Ion battery, 90$ for a
second hand floppy tray, 260$ for 2 256Mb IBM compatible SODIMM's but in the
end the A22e turned out to be way more "expensive" then my 2000$ iBook and
all of its software.

Buy it if the price is OK and your budget is tight but think about it twice.

-- 
Cheers,
Zoran. 

Windows software isn't released, it's allowed to escape.