For the last year and a half I've been working on a solid Fujitsu N Series Lifebook (3010). It's a P4 2.66 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. The machine is a bit heavy and I suspect it's part of the reason I'm in physical therapy for an impingement in my right shoulder, but it's been a workhorse and I've been lucky to not have experienced the problems that Myk and chofmann have with their Lifebooks.
The key feature of this laptop for me has been the perfect resolution screen with amazing contrast and visibility. It's a 15 inch screen with 1400 by 1050 resolution. The 1050 lines in a 15 in form factor gives me just the right font size. After spending a couple of years on 1600 by 1200 in 15 inches and 1024 by 768 in both 14 and 15 inch form factors, I've decided that fonts are just too small in the UXGA displays and too large in the XGA screens. (Now, if they put those same UXGA pixels in a standard aspect ratio 17 inch screen, that might work a lot better for me :-)
Well, the time has come to replace the old Fujitsu and Myk (who still has the same Fujitsu as me) found an awesome deal, saving nearly $2,000, has just put in orders for our two new machines.
This time around we're going with IBM laptops. The model is the ThinkPad T42 and it comes with the 15 inch screen at 1400 by 1050, a Pentium M 1.8 GHz processor and Centrino wireless jazz, 2 GB of RAM, a 7200 RPM 60 GB hard drive, and a nice CD-RW/DVD-RW optical drive. It's also got that nifty nipple pointer thing that I miss from my Dell Latitude days.
This will bring me and Myk up to speed with brendan, bryner, dbaron, darin, and maybe some others at our office who have nice ThinkPads. I'll finally be able to run multiple VMWare virtual machines without having to pause one when I need to start up another.
Posted by asa at February 8, 2005 05:23 PMIt sounds like a sweet rig. Did you realize you are getting a laptop that will soon be supported by chinese company Lenovo (http://www.internetnews.com/bus-news/article.php/3456051)? I guess it probably doesn't matter, as Lenovo is China's largest PC manufacturer so they probably know what they are doing. I just thought I'd drop an interesting note on this topic, read it how you like. :)
Posted by: Yacoubean on February 8, 2005 06:52 PMCan I have your 'old' laptop. Please.
Posted by: Hellsbellboy on February 8, 2005 08:28 PMGotta love the ThinkPads. Got my T40 back in August '03, can't live without it. Incredibly tough.
I accidentally fell on it and slid down 3 stairs, on concrete stairs mind you...icey stairs in a Canadian winter + backpack...
At work, literally everyone has a ThinkPad as standard-issue. It's amazing the stories people put these things through...one girl ran over it with her car. It broke the LCD screen, which cost about $350 to replace, the rest of the computer was unfazed.
Posted by: Dave Milford on February 8, 2005 08:31 PMWhere did you find a T42 with that resolution? IBM's T42 product page says the max res is 1024x768:
Posted by: Ron on February 8, 2005 08:50 PMWould you care to share this "awesome deal" with us, please :) I'm in line for one, but I'll wait out for the T43 with the Sonoma chipset due on 25th (I believe). So far as Lenovo is concerned, heck, everything else sold in USA is made in China anyways, so what now they start to be serviced by them as well !
Posted by: JS on February 8, 2005 08:55 PMYou guys got the exact same laptop i am writing this comment on. No joke, its a great machine. Don't worry about ibm selling the thinkpad business the machines work like rocks and are amazing! 10x better than dell POSs. its also pretty light,
Posted by: ed on February 8, 2005 09:00 PMAsa, Are you able to create a "low memory" environment via vmware ? It may be interesting to test Firefox/Thunderbird in low memory environments. Maybe combine that with an OpenBSD/pf transparent bridge to simulate the network you desire via ALTQ. BTW. I've emailed drivers about this. Etnus which makes a commercial debugger for Linux/Unix has in principle agreed to donate some licences to MoFo. I hope you/others from MoFo are able to follow up on this
How much for your old laptop then? :) I'm looking to buy my very first laptop since it would be very useful to have one at the university. But my budget is way more restricted than yours since I'm just a student on loans...
Posted by: David Tenser on February 9, 2005 10:18 AMI have a Thinkpad T42p for work, and I love it. I think it's the same as the T42, except it has a better graphics chipset, and the 1600x1200 screen. It's nice and fast yet still very lightweight.
Posted by: Ted Mielczarek on February 9, 2005 10:48 AMTed, I don't consider tht graphics chipset and screen "better", actually. I evaluated that model (brendan has one) and I can't cope with the tiny fonts. Scaling down the resolution produces a pretty blurry read too. If you've got good eyes, or don't mind zooming system or app fonts, then it's a great machine. I've run at that resolution on a 15" screen before and it's just too small for me.
David, I believe that my current laptop will be going to one of the other QA folks here. I'll let you know, though, if we're going to get rid of it.
Yusuf, yes, I can and do simulate low memory environments on VMWare.
--Asa
Posted by: Asa Dotzler on February 9, 2005 01:00 PMI recently purchased a notebook myself couldn't decide exactly what to get IBM or Toshiba, got a sweet deal on a Toshiba Qosmio F10-101 so I bought that. I have to say I've never worked on a better notebook. It has the best screen I've ever seen even sound is amazing for a notebook not to mention numerous other features.
If I didn't get that I'd probably wait and get myself a T43 which is bound to be great.
Good luck with your T42 I'm sure it will serve you well.