Brand new sparkling laptop
After many weeks of waiting, I finally have my laptop with me. Its a Thinkpad T41p and I just love the 1400×1050 resolution that comes with it. Once I have the GPRS connection setup to my phone, things should be rocking. I installed linux and almost everything works out-of-the-box. Still need to get hardware acceleration working for my video card and need to buy myself a wifi router.
In other news, Rasmus lost his Thinkpad T42p at a PHP conference. Imagine, a PHP user stealing a laptop from the creator of PHP.
I installed linux 2 and almost everything works out-of-the-box.
??
Sorry typo. I have no clue how the ‘2’ got there.
*Sigh*. there are some things, which even the spell checkers cannot fix.
brand new??
ah think pad from company where i am placed 😀
what are u doing with ur old 1 ?
I guess he had to give it back to Yahoo! 🙂
i thought he had a personal 1 as well … did u kallu ?
great going
checked your blog after hearing about the Elephant photographs from someone.
Had a blast reading through the blog, frankly it’s quite inspiring reading about all the things ( photography, helicopters, blah, blah) you are into.
Great going dude.
Something you’ve probably already seen – http://theorie.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de/~arwagner/computer/T41p/
Wrong distro, dude. I got there first.
Kallu’s laptop runs FC3 – installed effortlessly off the FC3 DVD I gave him.
Bwahaahahahahahaha!
Sounds nice, especially the high resolution (have fun the first time you connect it to an LCD projector though – 1024×768 does have its uses there).
I had to do a bit of work to get stuff up and running to my taste (centrino, gprs, acpi stuff etc). Slackware 10 on an Acer Travelmate 292 laptop. It is more fun that way than with Fedora 🙂
A thinkpad would have been my choice as well except for the trackball.. for me at least, trackballs are a tailormade recipe for a sprained finger, if not actual RSI (though people I know seem to love them).
Yes.. not the one I got from the US.
Yep. I sold off that one and got this new one. The old one could only do 1024×768.
Re: great going
Thanks dude and welcome to LJ.
>for me at least, trackballs are a tailormade recipe for a sprained finger, if not actual RSI
blasphemy! by the way it is trackpoint. and I believe the t41p also has a trackpad like most other laptops
Gentoo suxor.
Too late. I got my claws into this guy way back in the 20th century. His soul is mine!
Here is a pic of him around that time.
Notice the blank look?
Bwahahahahahaaaaa!
p.s. read carefully what it says on his green badge….
Now, this Thursday….
> and I believe the t41p also has a trackpad like most other laptops
yeah, and that is the first thing I disable. 🙂
trackpads are a major pain for anyone who types a lot and has large hands/thumbs – one light acidental tap on the pad with your thumbs, and your cursor aint where it was a second ago! 🙁
This is going to be a nightmare next year when I switch to a powerbook!
man.. o man.. sure have come a long way. and I used to be thin for a change 😀
I’m on the verge of buying a T42 to replace my trusty old 600x (or so I think). I’d be grateful if you could answer a few questions…
1) Did you get this one from the US. If so, is IBM’s warranty honored in India?
2) Does it have a 15″ screen? 1400×1050 would make things look mighty small on 14.1″, no?
3) I got an R40e for someone sometime back, and making it dual boot was a royal pain in the ass because of the hidden “restore partition” from which windows is set up. The IBM india guys refuse to give the Windows installer CD separately although you pay for the license. Did you try to get one? Come to think of it you probably removed windows altogether.
4) IBM RAM == expensive. Did you buy extra RAM locally?
Thanks!
> 1) Did you get this one from the US. If so, is IBM’s warranty honored in India?
I got it here itself. All the US machines will have 1 year warrenty and they are worldwide warrenty. I have a 3 year warrenty on this one.
2) Does it have a 15″ screen? 1400×1050 would make things look mighty small on 14.1″, no?
15″ is too big really. Thats one of the reasons I exchanged my prev laptop. 1400×1050 on 14.1″ is really good. trust me on it
3) I got an R40e for someone sometime back, and making it dual boot was a royal pain in the ass because of the hidden “restore partition” from which windows is set up. The IBM india guys refuse to give the Windows installer CD separately although you pay for the license. Did you try to get one? Come to think of it you probably removed windows altogether.
I just locked that pre-desktop partition for now and did linux on it. Vibhav is getting my IBM XP cd’s from the US.. so I will just make a copy of them. All you will need is the same too. If you go for T42+, then there is an option to backup the whole data to cd’s
4) IBM RAM == expensive. Did you buy extra RAM locally?
Not yet..
Overall either go for T41p or t42p… I got myself T42 from the US and decided 1024 resoltion is not good enough for me
Hehehe. Hehehe. Poor deluded masses.
And a BeOS supported, too. 😀
Any more skeletons in the closet (other than the one sitting in the picture above)?
As far as I know, the T42 has a resolution of only 1024×768, which is why
There seem to be a few models. The 2378FVU for instance. Costs $100 more than the one I had almost decided on though… Do you think it’s worth it?
Dude dude , you look all changed now and look even smarter now 😉
Views on R50E
i was planning to buy an R40 E due to its price and configuration, now since r50e is available at same price, i may go for it,
i would like to know
#) how was your experience with R40e/R50E?
#) how was it performance?(i want to use it for development, linux and java will be my weapon of choice…so i m looking for good performance)
#) any pros and cons?
i know T series and X series are best buys but they r way outta my budget..so i need some inputs on R40e or R50 e..
i m plannin to upgrade the RAM to 512 MB..any pointers on that??
Thanks in advance
Yes, I think it’s worth it – you get extra resolution and an ATI Radeon 9600 for $100 extra. Of course, it depends on whether you value the extra resolution or not.. 🙂
Re: Views on R50E
Sorry for the delay in replying…
1) #) how was your experience with R40e/R50E?
The R40e was bit disappointing. It’s a thinkpad all right, but you can see that corners have been cut. There is no infrared port for instance ( lots of phones have IR nowadays so it could be useful ). More bulky than my 4 year old 600x (although it was 14.1 inch, the models available now are 15 inch, so probably even heavier ). The case was plastic as opposed to the metal on the 600x, so slightly flimsier though probably no worse than the competition. Maybe it was my imagination but even the keyboard seemed stickier than the one in my old thinkpad. Maybe it gets better with use. I would suggest you look at models from other manufacturers in the same price range before deciding (i didn’t do much research).
I find the thinkpad keyboard much better than the ones on other laptops. (Even looks better than the one on the Powerbook, but then I’ve just played around with it in stores). The trackpoint needs some getting used to but chances are you’ll love it.
#) how was it performance?(i want to use it for development, linux and java will be my weapon of choice…so i m looking for good performance)
The Celeron R40e was underpowered (2.2 GHz). The R50e models which have the discount are the Celeron-M 1.4 and the Pentium-M 1.5 ( I havent seen direct comparisions of the P-4 against P-M, but I am led to believe that a 1.5 GHZ P-M would perform approximately as fast as ~2.5GHz P-4). I wonder how crippled the Celeron-M is. The banias P-M chip has 1MB L2 cache, so the Celeron cant have too much less. ( Note that the R50e probably has a Banias P-M and not the newer Dothan one (2MB L2 cache) ). Honestly I dont know how much difference it will make. Upgrading RAM is probably a good idea. If you’re particular about performance, you should probably go for the 1.5 GHz P-M model (~60k?) Dualing booting was painful but it is still possible to make it dual boot with windows installed from the restore partition. You might have to go through hoops to retrieve the installer files for the software that is installed during the restore process. (The only useful things i could see were the CD writing software and Norton Antivirus).
One note about linux: I had to disable APM/ACPI to get the kernel to boot. ( Suse 9.1 ). All other hardware seems to be detected correctly.
#) any pros and cons?
See #experience
Also the warranty is 1 yr as opposed to 3 yrs on most models available in India.
i m plannin to upgrade the RAM to 512 MB..any pointers on that??
Adding one more 256 stick will probably max out the available slots (2 slots, 1 occupied already). You might as well go for 512 more.
IBM’s ram prices seem to be twice the market rate. Try to get it elsewhere
Re: Views on R50E
Thanks for a detailed reply..
it was quite informative…
i like thinkpads and consider them best bet for developers but your viewpoint about considering other brands in that range(<60k) makes sense..may b they came out with a very scaled down version of thinkpad with R40e which mite not b useful for me...
if you come across any interesting links related to this issue, please do post here…
Thanks again..
Where did you get it from? Link? Price?