[ltp] Step up T60

[Helen Borrie]

At 02:05 AM 13/03/2009, Chris Schumann wrote:
>Helen Borrie wrote:
>>... I'm now the delighted owner of a T60.
>Welcome to the club, Helen! I have one myself: 2623-D7U.
>
>>The T60 is a 2008-HK4 with the T5600 (1.8 GHz) Intel duocore, 15.4"
>>display with Radeon X1300.  Currently it has 512MB RAM 

In fact, when the box arrived, I found it has 1 GB RAM (not 512 MB as advertised).  Not sure whether the seller sent me the wrong one by mistake but I'm not complaining.

>I recommend a clean install followed by a data migration. See if you can create restore media from the existing hard drive. If not, there are many friends here for you to get restore media for that machine.

That's a good thought.  Actually, this afternoon I phoned IBM-Lenovo Support in Sydney, to make a general inquiry about what I could do as insurance against my proposed migration of the system partition to the bigger drive.  I think perhaps I pressed the wrong number in their phone menu...but anyway, Tech Support answered.  They kindly looked up all the numbers and actually made a support ticket for me in case things go wrong.  It turns out the T60 still has 14 mths' warranty left on it and they (two of them) assured me that they were there to help.  I'm still reeling from astonishment! :-) 

Anyway, they explained that the T60 should have tools there to make a set of CDs to restore the entire system partition in case things should go pear-shaped (which I confirm);  and they have XP system recovery disk sets available for not much cost in case my self-insurance measures should drop through the cracks.

>>Another plan is to commission the vmware 5 for Linux ...
>
>I'm using Xen on Fedora since it comes with it for free.

That's interesting...I'm keen to give Centos a whirl, as that's what we (an open-source project I'm steeped in) use for building our binary distros.  I might find Xen  on the ISO that I have.  (A colleague recommended Virtualbox:  most of our team are running Mandriva for our mainstream stuff;  this happens to be mostly coincidental but we have some involvement in the Mdva Enterprise packaging so in general it's just useful to have Mandriva handy for field-tests.)

> I have WinXP for testing IE since I'm a web developer; Solaris and FreeDOS for playing around. Since I also have a 320GB drive, I may add ReactOS, and HaikuOS too. I also dual-boot to Vista from time to time.

I think I am going to *start* with dual-boot and then fork VMs from there.  The Windows side of things is not really a big deal unless I'm travelling and need to hook into public facilities.

>>The
>>doubt I have about this is whether an OEM installation of WinXP
>>(which is an official Lenovo downgrade from Vista, hence no disks)
>>can be shuffled about like this.
>
>Since the T60 shipped with either Vista or XP, you can get restore media for either. For example, I have XP restore discs. If your machine has a Vista Business COA, it should also have downgrade rights and an XP product ID. Keep us posted when it arrives.

No disks;  and the COA sticker is for the Vista business edition that was originally installed by the factory in Singapore.  It sounds as though the local Lenovo folks don't ship the XP installation disk in the factory downgrade scenario.  That's just a guess:  the support guys didn't seem surprised that there were no disks.

>Your T60 is not 64-bit capable.

Right. ;-) I'm an AMD soul, admittedly.  All my non-portable boxes are AMD 64's of various vintages...not that I've invested in 64-bit Windows at all.

>You would need a Core 2 Duo CPU instead of the Core Duo you have. If the motherboard is revision 3 or later, you can upgrade the CPU to a Core 2 Duo, and then you could install a 64-bit OS.

When I get this baby under a real OS, I'll be able to run dmidecode to find out what-all is really there.

>Although I have no ExpressCard cards, I've never seen a limitation discussed. Since all the ExpressCard card-readers I've seen actually use the USB interface internally (the pins have both PCI-Express and USB ports), you should be doubly safe.

Yes:  I found a wiki about how that interface works (as I was spending the day Googling instead of working!). ;-) I think my better bet is to go for a PCMCIA SATA card and hang my spare storage off there, rather than mess about with things in the Ultrabay.  Plus, there's always USB, for I often don't care too much about performance from ancillary drives...at least, not yet...though I already love this T60 to bits and can foresee the day when I'd be using it for a lot more of the development stuff than I've used laptops for in the past.

> PS - I happen to be a Fedora fan myself, but F10 has been disappointing. Still, > I use it every day.

One gets comfortable with a distro, I think.  I didn't think I'd want to part from Red Hat 8 until I got Mandrake 9 (boy, that was a long while ago!) but I've stayed with Mandriva Community/Free for a few years now.  I've been a bit unhappy with Mdva 2008 (too many steps to get at stuff, too much eye-candy in the GUI.)  But the nice thing about Linux is that you're not stuck with one or another and there's always something new to try out.

Thanks to all of you for your tips and your kind support.  It has been much appreciated.

Helen