Requium for the X300 Series

Just when I thought I'd found THE perfect laptop for me, I hear news that Lenovo is pulling the plug on the X30x Series. Of course, I'm used to this issue already, but it's never-the-less a sad announcement for me. Used to it?

Well, ya see, I'm a little different than most people and therefore, my tastes are generally a little obscure. In this post, I'll just discuss my taste in laptops. It all started with the IBM ThinkPad 701c, the famous (yet technological deadend) dubbed "The Butterfly". It was abnormally small for the size of it's keyboard because an engineer got an idea while watching his children play with a jigsaw puzzle. It ended up being a "one-off" with no follow-up models at all since the market went to progressively toward bigger screens which negated the need to have a folding keyboard. Of course that didn't do away with the amazingly small size of this thing and the fact that even today, people still gasp when they see that keyboard unfold!
Then, on to my next laptop love; the IBM ThinkPad 600(e,x). For it, the screen was just the right size (13.3"), big enough so that you can see get a decent resolution, but small enough to keep the case small and easy to carry. The 600 was probably the last of the "old school" ThinkPads that were expected to sell for close to $5000, meaning that they were amazingly solid and had details that simply aren't seen today in the "normal" laptop computer. There were little doors and tight-fitting rubber plugs on all opennings, an amazing keyboard that many ThinkPad users still consider to be the best ever and a ultra-stiff case that gave it that German car feel that you simply don't find any more. It's successor, the T Series machines, although better in many ways, never recaptured the polish and "bespoke" feel that was part and parcel of the 600 experience. If you've ever gotten into one of the big BMWs or Mercedes; you know exactly what I mean.
So, I moved on and used a combination of T Series (T20, 21, 22, 23, 30, 40, 41, 42, 43) and X Series (X20, 31, 40, 41) over the years but never felt the same way about any of them. The 14.1" screens of even the smaller Ts made the machine a little big and heavy for a constant companion and the 12.1" screens of the Xs was a little too small and only gave XGA resolution at best which as a little less than what I prefer.
Then in 2008, Lenovo announced the X300. I knew immediately that it would the perfect size for me as an all-in-one machine. Less than an 1" thick, 3 pounds, built-in optical drive, and 13.3" high resolution LED backlit screen (1440 x 900).....selling at a heart-stopping $3000! After waiting for 2 years, I buy mine for $700 used (with a year of warranty left), and working on it for around 3 weeks now, I feel like I've finally found the successor to the last of the 600s, the 600X. The keyboard is the best I've worked on since then, and the screen is just right. The machine is FAST with the standard onboard SSD and the weight makes me not think twice about throwing it in a bag and taking it anywhere with me. There was even an magazine article the month that it was introduced (right after the Air) where the title was "Building The Perfect Laptop".
Talk about "Beauty and The Beast"; here it is with it's younger sibling, the ThinkPad W701 "Mobile" Workstation.
Well, I guess I can look forward to one more half-step upgrade down the road in the X301 and then I'll be waiting for another "special" product to come along. It kind of reminds me of the Japanese manufacturers: although they have a firm grasp of the realities of what part of the market they need to operate in to regularly make a profit, periodically they'd feel a need to flex their engineering muscle and demonstrate to the world what they CAN do. Then it's back to business as usual for a while.

Seminal Laptops

Rarely if ever, are products truly seminal, in that they are unique to the degree that they become iconic or that they change the design philosophy of an industry or market segment. What I'm going to attempt to address today is a highly personalized view of laptop computers that in my opinion are "seminal" products.

The mobile computer has been around for a LONG TIME.
...but this Osborne and it's competitors such as the Compaq, etc. can hardly be called "the face that launch a thousand ships", they were called "luggables" for a reason. I used to own an IBM PS2 P75 with a cool red Plasma screen, but the 400Mb HDD weighed than any of our ThinkPads! So, what was the Helen of Troy of laptop computing? Well; I present.....the IBM ThinkPad 700c:
$5000 in 1992 dollars could buy you this, the first machine with the then HUGE 10.4" TFT color screen and cutting edge technology. Although it was a lot of money in those days, companies looking to get ahead began to equip their workers with these things and everybody else was immediately playing catchup. However, the button-down black Bento-Box IBM look wasn't for everybody and as time moved on, Apple demonstrated that portable computing could be "cool" looking. In 1997, they came out with in my opinion the most beautiful machine of any laptop, the G3 PowerBook:

And then in 2001, the iconic G4 "Titanium":

This machine is so cool that it's still the defacto "laptop" on TV. Don't believe me? Just watch for them especially on commercials.

While this was going on, IBM came up with one of the most unique and innovative products ever to be produced, the 701:
With it's folding keyboard, it literally could turn itself into an impossibly small black-box that didn't look like it did anything. Product placement aside, if you want to figure out whether something is really technologically interesting; see if it shows up in a James Bond movie. This one was in "Golden Eye" and one other I believe. You even see Bond typing on and then closing it inside "Q" Branch while he was supposed to be listening to instructions. Of course this amazing technological accomplishment came to naught when the market went toward increasingly larger screens thus eliminating the need for a folding keyboard. Never-the-less, the "Butterfly" was one of the most interesting laptops ever. I have 2 in the closet!

HP also got into the act with the amazing OmniBook line; the really tiny 800 with the retractable mouse and the 500 that was matched with possibly best integrated "dock" of all time.Yes, boys and girls; there was a time when HP did more than just make money well.
If you are of the camp that thinks that Apple is THE design innovator out there, then their hype machine must be working. In 2003, long before the "Air" was a glimmer in Steve Jobs eye, Sony already had the X505 on the market. Sure, it won't do all that the 2008 machines such as the MacBook Air and ThinkPad X300 will do, but just look at it! FIVE years before those other machines!
Yup, sure enough; that's it sitting next to an "Air" making it look fat.

In the meantime, other Panasonic decided that the market (not just Military, Police and Emergency folks) needed to have the Hummer of laptops; the ToughBook. Yes they didn't invent it (IBM did) nor are they the only ones, but they define it:

Each of these machines did something to change, define or redefine the laptop computer as we know it. As for me, this little essay isn't finished without including my current favorite and everyday user: The ThinkPad X300
Think MacBook Air with an optical drive and it's shirt tucked in.....

"THE RANT": Adendum

Well, I just thought I'd throw this out there since, just as I was finishing up the Dell D600, I got a call from a former colleague that her (you guessed it), Dell Inspiron 8500 wasn't recognizing a year-old hard drive. She just brought it over and sure enough the drive comes right up when attached to my desktop, but acts like it's not there for the Dell. And guess what....it's a 160Gb drive...over the 137Gb HDD limit!

I'm reloading it for her on a 100Gb drive that I happened to have on hand, but WHAT A PAIN IN THE A**!!! Apparently, now that Bill Gates has retired to give away his money, and Michael Dell has returned to his company, he's ascended the throne of "The Devil".

For Pete's Sake; pay somebody in India to write up a new BIOS and fix this already!

My I HATE DELL Rant

I don't really "hate" Dell, but I just don't really like their computers. If they weren't so successful at what they did, I could happily ignore them and live a fulfilled life. However, they are the Wal-Mart of computing, so somewhat inescapable for someone like me who take on all comers (in computer for that is).

So, what do I mean, Wal-Mart of computing? Well, they are everywhere for one, so you can't really get away from them. If you work on people's computers like I do (even in your spare time), you're going to see them. Other than the ones I put out there, Dells are the single most common computer that I see. Just in the last month I've worked on 1 desktop and 3 laptops. OK, one was my fault since I ordered it, but that's a different story. What wrong with them then if people buy them. It's the commoditization of computers and they (along with HP) are the companies that are most responsible. Much like the stuff you get at Wal-Mart, what you get will get the job done, not elegantly, not particularly efficiently and it won't last very long, but it gets it done.....if you don't expect it to last.

Therein lies the issue. Computer companies like Dell and HP design their products to do one thing: MAKE MONEY. It's the Roger Smith (CEO of GM during the late 70's and early 80's) philosophy of business. In an interview, Mr. Smith (an accountant by the way) was being grilled by media on why GMs car designs were so bad compared to the Europeans and Japanese, his response was: "General Motors is not in the business to make cars, it's in the business to make money". There you have it.

If you didn't tear into various brands of computers on a regular basis like I do, you probably wouldn't notice and you'd be like the typical consumer. Go down and buy a laptop, use it for 3 years or so, then throw it away when it starts to run poorly. That's what most people do with cars isn't it? However, I'm in the business of restoring these machines to their original usefulness so I get to rebuild and often upgrade the components.

No, generally, I work on ThinkPads. These are special and I don't mean in a driving a BMW sort of way, but more like how a mechanic feels when he opens the hood up. You come to the realization that these things are designed to last a long time and to be kept up, so some engineer put some thought into what would happen if you had to work on it. This is not how Dells (along with most other brands) are made. They take the more Japanese car maker approach; it'll drive very nicely for a long time, then you get rid of it and get a new car. Witness that there is virtually no used car market in Japan.

Anyway, so what makes me say this about Dell. Well first of all, a Latitude D600 laptop that I had worked on came back to me last week with the second occurrence of a weird problem that's unusual for a relatively new OS load. It had a corrupt NT Boot Loader file, which causes Windows to get stuck on load and never get to the desktop. The data is there, just the Windows won't boot. The typical reason for this issue is a very old load that's too broken to fix itself, or a nasty virus/malware infestation that had broken that file. This machine has/had neither of those.....either time, so it had to be something else. While I was researching another Dell for somebody else, I came across a forum post talking about the 137Gb HDD limit in the BIOS. I thought; no, that couldn't be it since I regularly worked on ThinkPads of the same vintage and chipset that had no trouble with big hard drives. In fact I had used this exact same model of HDD in several machines for different people (WD 250Gb/5400rpm) in various ThinkPads and even an Acer. But I got onto the Dell support forum and ask some questions and sure enough, the answer I got was that; even with the newest BIOS versions, you can't have a boot partition bigger than 137Gb or you'll have issues! HOLY CRAP, what that means is that the limitation isn't in the chipset, but that someone at Dell decided that it wasn't cost effective to have somebody write a new BIOS version that address the issue.

THAT'S SO CLASSIC "BEAN COUNTER" MENTALITY!!!

You wanna bet that'll effect my future decisions on what to buy? Yup; don't care how cool the design is, and they have some great designs (eg. M1330), I'm not buying a machine from them!

Oh, yeah; my other case? I've been tasked with finding a "new" laptop for a friend's daughter who's about a year out of college. So her big clunky Dell Inspiron 1000 was just not cutting it. I won't even get into why that machine is a bad design to start with. What she wanted was something that's smaller than her parent's ThinkPad R52/15" that was going to be easier for her to travel with. So basically, I needed to find something; sub-five-pounds, that had all the drives built-in, but big enough for her to do the regular stuff on. IBM/Lenovo had/has nothing that fits that description other than the very recent X300/301 which didn't fit in her $300-350 budget. After about a week of research and finally deciding that acceptable Sony's didn't fit the budget either, I settled on the Dell 700/710m.

This machine had all the right specs, Pentium M/2.0Ghz processor, up to 1.5Gb of RAM, built-in DVD Burner, 12.1" aspect high-res screen. What's not to like? Given the budget, I had to settle for an older machine which meant that it didn't have DDR2 support or SATA HDD. I can live with that since I had a stick of !Gb DDR/333 sitting around that I could bump the RAM with, and a big 250Gb for it, although, I'd have to get around that 137Gb HDD limit in the BIOS......grrrr.

However, my gripe isn't with that, but with how the thing is constructed. The machine I bought was in decent shape, but had a chipped place on the keyboard bezel. "No big deal", I thought; I'll just buy another one and slap that right on. I've taken KB bezels off of dozens of ThinkPads. HAHA says Michael Dell's accounts (who apparently are in charge of the engineers)! I end up having to remove the screen, disconnecting 2 plugs, pulling the attendant wires out, including the WiFi leads, along with the expected keyboard. On top of that, the touchpad (device of the devil) was in better shape on the old bezel so I figured I'd move it. HAHA says the accounts again; "I shall taunt you again, English k-nigets"!!! The touchpad isn't a module, it's 3 separate pieces, one of which is attached to the bezel itself with melted plastic studs! So I advanced to the rear and the swap was not made.

Hey; otherwise, I love those Dells!

Digtial Detritus

It's clean-up/clean-out time around the Frugal Propellerhead household. One of the downsides of upgrading is that one is often left with misc. devices that don't work anymore....especially if your upgrading takes the form of the rare, but necessary operating system changes.

I guess I'm about waist-deep in a change-over to Windows 7. I dipped a toe in when I picked up the T43p a few months back and it had W7 loaded. So I left it the way it was to see if I'd like it and I definitely did; enough so that it planted a seed that has been growing in my little brain. Windows XPP has been a good friend, it's was a nice upgrade to Windows 2000, but worlds ahead of 98 or ME! But eight years down the road, it's time to say goodbye.

So, when I was looking at the X300s a few weeks ago, I also kept an eye on whether the machine had W7 loaded and the one I was able to snag had W7 Professional 64-Bit on it, along with 4Gb of RAM. However, along with the benefits of a 64-Bit operating system, there are some losses along the way. Some devices simply don't have the necessary drivers and probably never will. The main one so far has been the trusty little Canon LIDE 30, USB powered flatbed scanner. I don't use it much, but it's done a good job when nothing else would've even been along for the ride! At some point, I'll probably end up picking up one of the current versions such as the LIDE 100 as a replacement. Sometimes, there's just NO substitute for a flatbed scanner.

I have had a few surprises though. Amazingly, the converted from Thai, UltraNav compact keyboard I picked up works through a generic PS2 KB/Mouse to USB adapter! And shockingly, I found a Targus USB "Port Replicator" that had sat in the a box in the garage for 12 years took the drivers off of the Targus site and ran with it. This no small thing since the X300 only has the 3 USB and the one ethernet port. So this little small remote-sized device gives me an extra USB port, but PS2 KB/Mouse as well as parallel and serial(!) ports. Now if I can only get the software to recognize the GlobalSat BT-308, Bluetooth GPS receiver, I'd be golden!

For now, back to trying to get rid of stuff I don't/can't use any more.....

The "Holy Grail"

You guys that read this halfway regularly know that I love technology, but especially computers and cameras. So, I get pretty excited about lots of stuff: iPods, the Android phones, iPads, most anything Sony, pretty much any "small" computer (as long as its not a Netbook). However, every once in a while, something comes along that hits you right square between the eyes!

I remember when the MacBook Air came out, I thought that the concept was as close to perfectly executed as I'd seen in some time. The form-factor was virtually ideal. I've always loved the 13.3" screen size and that footprint married to something that thin was just mouth-watering. However, there were the few little things that bothered me about it: the ONE USB port, and something that sized that didn't have an optical drive was just going to be a deal-breaker! Yes, I understand how thin and cool it was, but I already have something almost as thin, just as light and DIDN'T have an optical drive in my ThinkPad X41.

Then within a month of the "Air's" introduction, Lenovo came out with the ThinkPad X300. THIS WAS IT! Almost as thin as the "Air", on-board optical drive (DVD Multi-Drive), LED backlit screen with the higher 1440 x 900 resolution and a 64Gb SSD! Holy Cow it was just impossibly perfect....with the exception of the out-of-this-world price of $3000+!!! So it might was well have been made of Unobtainium.
Fast-forward 2 years and lets look at how something like this fits into the Frugal Propellerhead's budget. I've been working on 2 different laptop computers; one a ThinkPad T43p mobile workstation which I bought for $250, but was worth about $100 more, the other a ThinkPad X41 complete with UltraBase and 32Gb SSD worth about $350 or so. That comes out to about $700 and amazingly, I came across an X300 on eBay that sold for about $655 3 weeks ago. Right around this same time, I friend called up looking for a machine spec'd like my T43p at the $300 price-point.

The rest is obvious and with a little bit of luck added (that machine that "sold" for $655 didn't go through and I got it for $667 the following week). Sold the T43p for $325 and now I just have to sell the X41 and I will have flipped my 2 older machines into one that still has a year of warranty left to go. If you've never seen and/or held one of these things, you owe it to yourself to go down to Micro Center and just pick it up (the current X301 that is). There's just no way that:

1. It's that thin!
2. It's that light with a 13.3" widescreen on it!
3. Anything that thin and light can feel that solid, open or closed!

As they say in Batman- POW!!!

The Free Kitten

Off topic, but hey, since I'm stuck here at Baylor Medical Center for at least another day or so, I thought I'd post this message about my funny little story.

It started on Father's Day a few weeks ago when my wife decided to get me a cat. So we go off that day out into the country....this is EAST TEXAS you understand so there are dirt roads and trailer houses involved......to pick a kitten from a lady who worked for our school district, but lived out in the country.

Here is where an experienced cat person would have turned and gone the other way, but we being "city folk" who've never owned a cat...... Anyway, the mother was an "outside cat" who NEVER interacted with people (in the country that means "mouser" and probably had any number of physical things wrong with it). So, after observing the kittens for 30 minutes I picked an orange tabby who actually wanted to play with people. So we took him home and I named him Indy (eg. Indiana Cat).

So the typical kitten type things occurred over the next several weeks. We (my wife) spent a great deal of money buying it toys, collars and a fancy litter box (it litter trained in 2 days), everybody got scratches. However, I got the more serious ones since I got to "put the cat up" when the time came (usually after the kids had riled it up). I didn't think a lot about it until I noticed that one scratch wasn't healing like the rest. We went the extra mile and ripped it open, washed it good, poured alcohol on it, slathered it with anti-bacterial cream and bandaged it. And finally early last week (after about a week), it started to get better.

That night I felt like I was coming down with the flu, so I took stuff and went to bed early. That was Wednesday night. Thursday (my day off), I spent in bed. Friday I felt a little better and thought I'd turned the corner on a little bug. Saturday, I woke up worse than before, so went willingly down to the urgent care place and they looked me over, listened to my story and with a straight-face, the Doctor says: "you have Cat Scratch Fever", to which I respond....."I thought that was just a an old Ted Nugent song! Oh I forgot to tell you that my fever was so high (103.2 and rising) that they gave me 800mg of Ibuprophen BEFORE the Dr. ever came in!!! :o

So I go home armed with my 2 prescriptions, and slightly amusing story about my ailment. I took the prescriptions and generally lay around all day, just to make certain I'd be good to go by Sunday night (July 4th) to start our little family mini-vacation. This is were the story gets good.

I wake up Sunday morning feeling pretty good, but my right eye feels a little funny, so I look in the mirror and see that I look like Phantom of the Opera; except that instead of that half-mask he has....the right side of my face diagonally down from my forehead to below my right ear is swollen and red. But hey; since I felt pretty good, I just thought that it was the lymph nodes clearing out the junk and it would go away. My wife looked dubious (I think she was really starting to feel guilty now). Later the doctor's office call to follow up and I mention this condition to which there is awkward silence followed by putting me on hold, then a doctor gets on to tell me she's calling the other doctor and finally telling me that they "strongly ENCOURAGE" (I really love how proper Indian doctors are) me to come in to be checked...immediately!

So I go, and on the afternoon of July 4th, I'm the only person there. She takes one look at me, tells me that she needs me to take MORE anti-biotics and go get a CT of my right eye area. The cute nurse from the day before comes in and ask me to pull my shorts down: that she was giving me 2 shots. One in each hip- 5 minutes apart "BECAUSE THEY ARE SO STRONG YOU ARE GOING TO FEEL LIKE YOU'RE PASSING OUT"!!! So I get my shots, she walks me out looking concerned. I go home, gather up the family in the car already packed to go on vacation and we go to a hospital to get my CT. On the way, we stop 3 times for me to make noise out the door and I almost pass out just inside the emergency room doors. After I'm able to get up and get through admitting, the person who has been waiting for me from CT had to take someone from emergency and we end up waiting another hour.

So, 5 minute CT later, after the tech sent the results to the doctor and tells me that everything looks pretty good and I can leave, we head out to get across Dallas to check into our hotel and go to the ballgame late, but hey, we really want to see the fireworks afterward. On the way, as we're stopped to pick up something we can eat in the car when the doctor calls and says that she want me to go to the downtown Baylor Medical facility emergency room and have blood work done and be started on IV antibiotics!

So that's how I ended up here. Yeah, we got to the ER, waited a minimum of time, but was in a room getting stuff done (4 vials of blood), and 3 bags of IV meds till 12:30am at which time they tell us that they're going "to admit me and keep me a few days". Around 2:30 July 5th, I get to my room, more nurse/hospital stuff for an hour or so, then I sleep till 5:30 at which time somebody comes in to get 2 MORE vials of blood from me.

....and you know what, I don't really feel sick at all; I just have that swollen half-a-face thing going on. There really is no such thing as a "Free Pet"!!!