After attending college for a year and finding out about the rough computer programs I have to deal with during the year, I decided to purchase an IBM Thinkpad. Last year, I brought 4 computers to school - a linux desktop server with windows installed as a last resort backup, a dual processor desktop to serve as my primary workstation, a tablet for the heck of it (it was also the only recent pc laptop I really had access to), and a sub-notebook pc. My dual processor desktop also had dual video out to drive two 19″ LCDs so I’d have my huge desktop to work from. Unfortunately, that desktop fried out, so I was left with only my tablet and my sub-notebook pc for the rest of the spring term. After having to spend hundreds of hours using Altera Quartus II 4.2 Web Edition on a 900MHz Pentium III-M tablet pc, I decided that I would not stand for this.
I had planned to wait at least a year to decide what I would purchase, and to get a better impression of what kind of conditions I needed to satisfy. I’m glad I made that decision because this year I have a much different list of priorities than I did last year:
- Power. The more, the better. Last year, I would’ve traded power for something smaller, but when you’re working with circuits, a 10.4″ screen just won’t do.
- Light. Not equivalent to being small. Something can be huge and still be light (when it is not as heavy as you expect it to be). Infers thin.
- Okay graphics. Something that will allow me to play games like Crack Attack and hopefully SimCity 4 and The Sims 2: University. Should be able to drive a 19″ LCD (I mean, I have two of them already) at 1280x1024.
- Long battery life. I need to be able to use this for a whole day, maybe not continuously, but pretty damn close. This is no different from what I wanted last year, of course.
That list generalized into the following component requirements:
- 14.1″ screen, and hopefully SXGA+ resolution, because XGA (1024x768) on a 14.1″ screen is just pitiful. I do XGA on 10.4″ screens already. Likewise, no 15″ UXGA. They’re simply too big.
- Pentium M. No Pentium III-M, no Pentium 4-M. Only Pentium M. Intel has made so many crappy interm chipsets that don’t really do SpeedStep well on either windows or linux that I’m pretty sick and tired of having to live with a “steedstepable” computer when it’s not.
- Centrino would be nice, so I won’t have to carry a darn wireless card.
- Secondary bay battery. How else would a laptop achieve day-long computing if it doesn’t have support for a secondary bay battery? If it didn’t have a secondary bay battery and had day-long computing capabilities, it would be known all over the world. And I know of no such unit (my 10+ hour sub-notebook doesn’t count. You can’t do anything on it).
The wishlist? PCI-Express. 128MB+ mobile graphics card. ABG integrated wireless. Bluetooth. USB 2.0. Firewire 800. S-video (for movies, DDR, etc). Gigabit Ethernet (half my network at home is on gigabit already). Cheap.
This lead me to one conclusion: An IBM Thinkpad.
Cheap? Heck no. Firewire? Nope. Half my requests churned out an incredibly expensive machine: $2000+. I finally found a model, T43 2687-D3U, that fit. It was cheap too - $1500 stock. I was almost set on buying it. I even attempted to order it online, but the online form failed. With Memorial weekend coming up, it wouldn’t make any sense to rush the order as no one would act upon it until the following Tuesday (it was Friday). Over this weekend, out of sheer luck, I got hold of someone who would let me use their EPP discount. Suddenly, a whole new world of pricing and opportunity presented itself.
I immediately went to look up my dream model, which cost $3600, to see what price it was in EPP. It was an amazing $2500. The closest online seller priced it at $3300, nowhere CLOSE to what I’d be able to get it from. I could conceivably sell my unit a year later to get another one with EPP pricing and still not lose any money.
And that’s how I met the T43p 2668-G2U. I placed the order, paid $250 tax and another $90 for the secondary bay battery (which was, of course, cheaper than any online retailer also), and waited. I was told that it was on at least 10 days’ backorder, and that it had to be built, shipped from Asia to a warehouse, and then reshipped from there. I waited patiently, and anxiously. People on the forums were also being very nervous about their units, one of whom actually ordered my model a whole week before I placed my order. I regarded all his status posts with caution, reasoning that if he ordered his a week before mine, then all the events that happened to him should happen to me a week later.
Scheduled to be shipped on June 14, my thinkpad arrived on June 9, two days after being shipped from HK. Needless to say, I’m very very impressed with the unit, and have never seen any other computer quite like it before. It’s fast, well built, light, thinner than any powerful Dell I’ve ever seen in my life, and is just a joy to work with.
I’ve reformatted it, installed a clean version of windows, installed all the programs I use and need, changed the settings to fit my quirks… I just need to install linux on it and find the properly undervolting settings for the unit.
All I need now is a name for it.
