[ltp] Why do you love your ThinkPad?

[Bernard Sufrin]

On Tue, 2005-06-07 at 00:35 -0400, Paul Cuciureanu wrote:
> .. let's assume for a second, each of us is one of those people that
> keep ranting on forever about their computers, etc..
> 
> Why do you Love your ThinkPad?
> 
> -- 
> Paul Cuciureanu
T30 with 750mb, 10x8, 1.8gHz: I ditched XP pro on the day it arrived,
then ran Redhat 9.2 for 3 or so years. Recently switched to Suse 9.3. 

This machine travels (on bumpy Oxford roads) a few miles to and from
work on my bike every day. It mostly sits, mainspowered, on port
replicators connected to bigscreen/keyboard/mouse, but I give my
lectures using it battery-powered with 10x8 projector.

1. Excellent service from IBM. They replaced the motherboard during the
last month of the warranty, after (my own stupidity) I managed to
overheat it spectacularly by leaving it switched on inside its
case for a couple of hours. Even then the only thing that had gone wrong
was that it had ''lost'' one of the memory bank sockets. I only noticed
the problem when it started thrashing and I found that it thought it
only had 256mb memory!

2. Solidity. In the 3 or so years I've owned it it's fallen off my
bicycle a couple of times (and got its corner run over by the bike
once); been end-over-end down two flights of stairs (in its case); ...
without any ill effects. Some might say it's too heavy for a modern
Laptop... but if that's what it takes to keep it from falling to pieces
after falls, I'll put up with it. [But see below]

3. My fingers are too damp for touchpads... I love the little red
thingy....

4. Speed.

I'm also Hon. Secretary of a dyslexia charity. We have 4 A31 (XP Pro)
built like tanks, and an X31 (Suse 9.3) built like Tinkerbell. I'd swap
the X31 for the T30 TOMORROW IF ONLY THE X31 WERE AS PHYSICALLY ROBUST
AS THE T30. The only time I feel slightly irritated at the T30's weight
is when I pick it up after having travelled with the X31.

Minor whinges

1. 20gb disk is a little on the small side; though it does force me to
keep things tidy!

2. USB1 only: it would be nice to have built-in USB2 to drive my
external devices; as it is I use a Belkin PC-card USB2 driver. (Suse 9.3
picked it up instantly)

3. No internal WiFi

If I could find a T4x of round about the same weight, and if IBM made
cheap port-replicators for T4x I'd probably move up.