Propellerhead Gear: Suits Me To A "T"

The IBM (now Lenovo) ThinkPad "T" and I go back a loooong way. Actually, back to the beginning......Y2K. Remember that? Anyway, it was my first real full-time IT job and the responsibility of making sure that my department's technology, at the University of Illinois-Chicago was Y2K compliant. It was a poke in the eye, but hey, I got to make the call on, and order up my very first laptops. I replaced the aging ThinkPad 380ED with brand new T20 for our mobile workers. Let me tell ya; I was the IT guru/hero immediately! I learned to love that machine and almost every "T" thereafter. By that point in my mobile computing life, the ThinkPad roots already ran deep. I had bought a legendary 701c a few years earlier, which was followed by the phenominal 600. When the "T" (for titanium) came out in 2000, I understood that in order to get under the $4000 price-point, IBM had to do away with some of the little refinements that had always been there, like covering the ports, and many of the rubberized surfaces, etc. Remember the old days when every ThinkPad came with a form that the owner filled out and mailed in so they would send you an engraved little plaque with your name on it? Be that as it may, the new "T" was an amazing performer and extremely well put together. And in IBM tradition, it was filled with innovations ranging from the titanium infused casing (hence the T), to the "Thinklight" to give you just a little bit of illumination when typing in the dark. At right around 5 pounds complete with optical drive, this computer defined the "Thin and Light" category of mobile computing. I was able to use the T20 at work for my 2 years at UIC, but later would personally own every model of that series, T21, T22 and finally the excellent T23. The later machines introduced me to the world of "high resolution" at 1400 x 1040 (SXGA+) in a 14.1" screen and I've been addicted every since.

Then came the T30 of 2002. I owned it, I used it, but unlike my other "T" ThinkPads; I did NOT love it. Let's just say that the smoking hot P4 was just not a good fit for the "T" Series philosophy.......as witness by the "big butt" on this machine as compared to the T23 which came before and the T40 that came after! This model is probably responsible for me diverging and getting involved with the "X" machines.... but that's a different post.

I think IBM recognized it's mistake and replaced the T30 the following year with the T40. With it, the design went 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Kinda like the supermodel in the little black dress. Don't get me wrong; it looked great, and I loved carrying it, but they made it so thin that the chassis flex, combined with the hotter GPU begat the infamous ATI, BGA failure issue. I never had it happen to me, since I was ultra-careful not to stress the bottom of my T40, T41, T42p, or T43, but it was a common failure and gave IBM a substantial "black-eye", although pretty much every manufacturer in the industry suffered similar failures. At this point, I'll have to admit that I personally jumped ship and went with the X300 for my next personal laptop (which I've already written about).

Although, I had already personally moved on, the T60 and T61 of 2006 and 2007 were important machines in several ways. Sadly, 2005 brought the sale of the ThinkPad brand by IBM to Lenovo. Although, many of us loved our ThinkPads, IBM was basically loosing money on every computer it sold, so the hand-writing had been on the wall for some time.

Business aside; what about the machines? Those of you who are sharp-eyed, might have already noticed that I put the images in reverse order. Why? We bought them that way! Before I had gone over to the X300, my wife had been using ThinkPads out of the lower-end of the corporate line; the "A" Series, the "R" Series and the "Z" Series. So instead of the T60, she was using the Z61m which was essentially a widescreen version of the same machine. So a couple of years ago, I picked up a T61 for her, installed a big (in those days) 240Gb SSD and she was set.

I really like this series of machines (T60/61). While not as thin and light as the T4x, neither did they suffer from the same chassis flex and heat issues of the T4x. Lenovo went to a rigid internal "roll-cage" design which made these some of the most rugged laptops ever designed. The only real "black mark" were the high-end models' use of the nVidia GPU which often failed leaving a completely dead machine. Of course, this was an industry-wide issue and that video chip manufacturer would end up paying settlements in the billions over it! Up until recently, we had 3 (2 with the nVidia GPU), outfitted with SSDs and 4Gb of RAM. They've been excellent machines for us. Last year, we finally got into the T60 game when my brother sent me some of his old machines for use in my wife's classroom. Yup; they are older and somewhat slower, but they are just as rugged and serviceable on a day-to-day basis.

2014 dawned a new age in our house, when the T500 came to replace my wife's T61. If I hadn't told her about the switch, she probably wouldn't have noticed the difference! The machines are almost identical in looks and performance..... at least for what she does with it. The screen resolution is the same, although I think the newer panel is a little bit better than the old one, but the new keyboard isn't quite the equal of the old one, so it's a "wash". I do like that the newer chipset uses the current standard DDR3 RAM which makes upgrades cheaper. So now, both she (T500) and I (X301) both use the same spec of memory, which I prefer. I have a single 4Gb module in her machine which will allow me to easily get to up to 6 or 8Gb in the future.

For the better part of 15 years, between myself and my family, we've used/owned all 12 models of the "T" series from the original T20 to the T500. I'm certain that we'll get around to the newer T510/520/530 as well, when the time comes!

ThinkPad Therapy

See, it's like this........ When I'm frustrated with something, and I can't resolve the problem to my satisfaction, what I do is to fix something. That generally means a computer, or two..... As you guys know, I've been going round and round with Dell over the charge connector on my son's tablet. So far, the results haven't been very good. So over the course of the last few days, I've resorted to self-medicating! No, not like that!

My form of self-medicating started out with a lavender colored IBM ThinkPad X30. About a year and half ago when my then-four-year-old daughter needed a computer. Unlike my son who wasn't really delivered, but "booted-up", she wasn't as electronics oriented as the boy. So I endeavored to make her first computer more "friendly", when experimenting with a rather large and black ThinkPad A21p didn't go very well. So I found her a small "X Series" machine that had enough power to get her on the internet to play some games, and yet be small and unintimidating. Thus was born the "Princess Edition", X30 that I spent the better part of a week painting to get ready for her birthday that year. Well, time has come and gone, as have Patches and Service Packs, which didn't do the old girl any good. So, a few weeks ago, I breathed some life (screen, SSD, RAM) into a derelict X61 and baby girl got an upgrade. This of course left a $3000+, in year-2002-dollars laptop which runs on a PIII-M! If I was in any way normal, it would have found it's way to the garage to sit in a box till eventually it would be disposed of. 

But No.....that's NOT what frustrated, Frugal Propellerheads do! I already had an X31 base (P-M/1.6) sitting in a cabinet, so why not slap together a knock around laptop. However, it was lavender! Can't be seen running around with a lavender laptops, now can we? So, an hour of sanding time later, it was no longer black. I had for some time watched YouTube videos showing guys (some, more successful than other) painting most anything to look like carbon fiber. Here was the perfect excuse to "give it a go" as our British friends would say. The lid already had been none-too-gently sanded; so what you see here are the results.

I sprayed the entire thing silver, taped on the liner, then sprayed on flat black through the rubber mesh. This is what it looked like after the liner was taken off. As you can see, I made a mistake in not stretching the material flat to eliminate the creases.

In this second picture, I had "fogged" the lid with the flat black and the creases aren't nearly as obvious.

After a second fogging, it's much more uniform, and is now awaiting a "satin" clearcoat.

After the clearcoat, it actually looks pretty good, for a really quick-slapped-together job. Over all, I'm pretty happy with it. Particularly since it was for therapy anyway. So people paint, others do wood-working: I work on computers!
 

 

Buy the Best

For someone who spends very little (relatively speaking) on his technology, this sounds kind of crazy doesn't it? Here's the issue: when you buy used (most of the time), you can't afford to buy "cheap". There's a huge difference between "inexpensive" and "cheap". It's my philosophy that one of the major problems with modern American society is the "Walmart-ization" of the consumer model, which is not to say that there's anything wrong with shopping at Walmart per se, but that we've come to "buy into" buying cheap and new. This unfortunately leads us into buying "more" (since it breaks and can't be fix economically) vs. better quality. Of course, we aren't the only nation in the world guilty of this as Target (Dayton-Hudson/French) and Ikea (Swedish) are more than willing to participate in this business model as well!

......but enough with the soap-box! Today, I'm here to talk about buying quality at a great price. As most folks are well aware, if you really want to take it to an extreme, you can always buy a Mercedes and keep it for 20-25 years and 500,000 miles plus. However, this blog is about about the typical consumer electronics and office type products we use daily and buy regularly so I'll concentrate on those and discuss why I buy what I do.

What started this started this whole thought process was, of all things, some bad RAM! Of course, buying this sort of thing on eBay is a risky proposition to start with, but there are benefits to this type of risk-taking. One of the areas that I don't compromise is the RAM that I use in my personal machines. I tend to use Mushkin as much as I can. Mushkin is a small outfit out of the Denver area that originally made their name by making upgrade memory for Macs. Their high-end (it's all high-end, just a matter of degrees) stuff is considered ultra-reliable and stable. I've been using it for a number of years now and have never been disappointed. However, it tends to be pricey, even used. So I bought some a month or so ago to upgrade my desktop to 8Gb and for my XP box build-up. Both sets came in with problems! I contacted them and after some tech support to try a couple of things it was determined that what I already knew....they were bad. So I was given the RMA and shipped them off to their Pfugerville, Texas support facility. Less than a week later, I got back a replacement (4Gb) pair for the "Blackline" RAM, but since the "Silverline" (1Gb) pair has been long-since out of production, they sent me 2 (4Gb) pairs of their current model for that spec! That's 8Gb vs. the 2Gb that I sent them! I'm currently running 12 sticks of their RAM and 2 SSDs in my machines. You think they might very well have kept this customer for a while longer!?!

While on the subject of Macs (at least peripherally), I've always had people ask me why I don't use them. And the fact of the matter is that they are outstanding products (other than that accursed touchpad of course)! Everything they produce from computers, to iPods, to the iPad have excellent design, outstanding engineering and generally top-notch build quality. So, what's the issue? The fact is that they just don't sell enough of them to drive the the price to a level I'm willing to pay on the used market and given their fanatically fan-boy following, that keeps the price up even higher. However, some of their products are some dominant that they've become common in the used market and make great deals. We have a whole fleet of iPods of various types around the house and use them regularly. The "Classic" is such a great product for the price it's hard not buy them and use them for both music as well as portable storage. 

We'll start with the ThinkPads that we use in our house. Back when I started working in IT about 15 years ago, it was not a given that virtually all products would work relatively well, right out of the box. Those were the days when a basic desktop PC would run you $2000-2500 and laptops routinely cost $3000-3500+. Furthermore, if you made the mistake of buying a Packard-Bell, CTX or Acer, chances were good that it didn't work well and were very difficult if not impossible to update. Then as now, I wanted to have both a desktop and a laptop computer and certainly couldn't go out and just buy both. With the help of my brother, I built a clone 486 cpu based desktop and bought a used laptop. In those days, very few people owned laptops and they tended to be a little difficult to work with. Of course, I further exacerbated the issue, by getting an "ultra-portable" which commonly for that time, had very few features built in. I had fallen in love with the amazing design and engineering of the IBM ThinkPad 701c "Butterfly". They were already old and kind of obsolete at the time, but the one I found was still under warranty. So for the next year IBM ThinkPad product support patiently worked with me on everything from driver installation of various peripherals to reloading of operating systems and communications set up. In the process, I learned to work on computers and created a future career for myself in IT. Over the years, I learned that there was a huge difference not only in how companies built their products, but also supported them as well. As an example, I found the not only was IBM willing to work with me for hours on end to resolve a problem, they'd even do it when it involved connecting to someone else' product (like my Panasonic CD-ROM drive). Let's just say that not all companies behave this way. I could of course go on about this for hours, but lets get down to other specifics.

In my home theater, I have a number of products made by Onkyo. Many are branded Integra which is their premium line (like Lexus vs. Toyota), but made by Onkyo nevertheless. I once sold their products in a former life and found that they embodied what I would call a great "bang for the buck" product. They sold slightly above the Best Buy range, but rarely if ever failed and offered performance far superior to their modest (typically $500-1500) price-point. 
They are far less "known" by the general public than the more popular Japanese competitors such as Sony, Pioneer and Yamaha, but offer a more neutral sound and better cost-build quality ratio. My plan is to eventually move up to the level of good separate made my Rotel, but that's essentially the same story with a British accent. And of course it is a brand that isn't well-known by the general public either.

The line that makes up the core of my other main hobby (photography via digital SLRs) is the exact opposite. There is probably no other company that has the brand recognition in photography quite like Nikon. Yes, I'm aware that there's higher pedigree (among cogniscenti) like Leica or Zeiss, but I'm discussing the general population here and certainly not "nose-bleed" prices either! My main draw to Nikon isn't so much the brand as it is the consistent commitment to quality and non-obsolescence. To one degree or another, the same could be said of Canon, Pentax or even Sony (Konica-Minolta), but I'm happy with my choice. There are simply an unbelievable number of lenses out there that will fit the mount going back to the 1960s.  And because they've been an industry leader for so long, there's a wide variety of models that have been produced and now occupy price-points ranging from $150-200 all the way up into the thousands on the used market. And of course the other half of the equation is that their quality is such that purchasing a used Nikon DSLR isn't a risky proposition. The buyer can generally expect it to last somewhere around 100,000 shutter actuations or more. The typical buyer of these cameras new, usually put on less than a quarter of that number before they upgrade. Great for frugal buyers everywhere!

My last example today was the subject of the last post; my new office chair...the Aeron by Herman Miller. Here's what happened to lead to this acquisition. I was actually VERY happy with a chair that was left to me by a previous co-worker when he left. It was a simple, but decent chair with nylon mesh upholstery vs. the more typical cloth. I tend to get hot sitting and wanted something that would breath, so I was pretty excited to have it! However, as it aged, the foam started to wear out and lose the support it used to have. Plus, one of the things common to inexpensive office chairs is the they tend to just simple bolt to the base, meaning that there is something like 1/4" or so of the actual bolts that extends into the seat. That's all fine of good when the chair/foam was new, but cheap padding tends to loose it's support quickly and now I easily feel the ends of those bolt poking me in the nether regions any time I'm in it for more than about 10 minutes! So, I've been on the lookout for a replacement. As I said in the previous post, I thought I found it in another Herman Miller chair that I fixed up, but it went to my wife with the bad back. This of course set the stage last month for my eBay find of the year; the $135 Aeron chair in Amarillo. 

And this perfectly highlights my point in this post. Generally, you can get away with picking up a used product and get satisfyingly good results from it if it was an excellent well-built product to start with.....however, this is almost never the case with "cheap" poorly-made products from the beginning. All manufactured product are designed and constructed to a useable lifespan. Cheap products have a relatively short one, even for non-professional use, but well-built products often wear like iron long after the other has broken. Furthermore, the better products are often made to be repaired and can be at a fairly low price for the part, plus a little labor. A perfect example is the Aeron chair I bought with a gas cylinder needed replacement. It's a $35 part and 20 minute project, but there's not a good way to fix the padding on my "pain-in-the-A**" cheapo office chair it replaced!