Ahhh, new laptop smell. The generous folks at my employer apparently get a pretty good deal on laptops, so I recently acquireed a shiny new Thinkpad T41p. An extra gig of RAM (bumping me to 2GB), an extra 80 gig hard drive (bumping me to 160GB!), and all the USB/Bluetooth/CDR loving a guy could handle.
This review pretty much sums up my findings: Awesome
I also wanted to throw in a little rant. Why in the world don't wintel laptops include Firewire? Is it the licensing fees? The Mac-ness of it? It's not like external hard drives and camcorders are platform specfic. I've got 17 USB 2.0 ports, what's a guy got to do to get some Firewire action? If I had to guess, I'd say it's just a symptom of Intel being stubborn on their USB 2.0 bet, so manufacturers don't get Firewire 'free' like they do with USB 2.0, NIC's, and wireless chipsets that all come with the Intel motherboard designs. That said, it's still annoying.
All that aside, here's my favorite part: I spend a few days preparing the laptop for my switch. Finally, Saturday afternoon rolls around, and via the magic of dragging three folders (I have filesystem OCD, sue me), all my stuff is moved over. Hours and hours of the drive in my old laptop chugging away laborously, I check on the new machine late Saturday night, and all the files have been copied. I go to bed anticipating a long Sunday of geekery tweaking the new machine.
However, I awoke to realize that my Saturday night virus scan on the old machine, shortly after the culmination of the massive file copying, had completely shot the old hard drive, which had been making the 'clicking noise of death' for some time now. How's that for timing?
It would appear that the strain was more than it could bear.
But on the flip side, I've got a shiny new laptop, and it's fantastic. I still need a Powerbook, but hey, beggers can't be choosers.
Update: 2.5 hours of surfing on the porch later, I've still got 60% battery left. Awesome.
Post a comment