The "X" Factor

I admit it: I have a weakness for "Halo" products..... who doesn't? Over the course of the last few months, I began to think about a replacement for my X301 that has been my personal laptop for the last couple of years. No, it's not too old for what I do with it, but there are certain aspects of it that have called attention to themselves in a negative way. More and more of my external devices are USB 3.0. Even the Penryn generation of Intel's Core 2 Duo line is showing it's age, but especially so with the ULV or Ultra-low voltage sub-group that the X301 uses. It's screen is getting increasingly less tolerable due to the combination of, not the greatest panel, high resolution (1440 x 900 on 13.3") and my inexhorably aging eyes! So, for the last month, I began the process of evaluating candidates for replacement.

First to come under consideration was the thin "S" version of the T4x0 series, but I ended up discarding when I came across my ultimate target. But actually the main competition was the MacBook Air. WHAT you say? TRAITOR! A Mac-In-Trash! Have I taken leave of my senses? Let's all take a deep breath....... that's it...... in... out..... Let's start with; what do I do with my personal laptop? It's on a browser almost 100% of the time, so the OS is irrelevent. We are increasingly a "platform-agnostic" home, with iPhone and iPads pretty much all over the place. We actually are owners of 5 (count-em, 5) iPads, but that a story for another time. We even have one of the "White" MacBooks around here as a learning tool for my wife now that she's in a "Mac-centric" school district and working on an iMac on a daily basis. Back to my original train of thought. I'm about "thin-and-light", and while Apple may not have invented the concept (actually IBM did), they might have perfected it! I don't care if you're a "die-hard" PC guy, you have to admit that the MBA (MacBook Air) is a tour d' force of industrial design, so much so that Lenovo had to emulate it. This summer, my missionary brother/sister-in-laws were here and when they are home for their furough, they take the opportunity to update their hardware since everything computer is cheaper here than in Austria. This time, he bought his wife a current 13" MBA, so I was able to get a firsthand look at it. It's just a really nice computer and would handle anything that I need for my laptop to do. Did I buy it? No..... and not because it's not a great computer. Believe me, I was close to going Mac! What kept me from turning to the Dark Side?

...... Yes..... that's a power adapter..... just like the other 6, 7 or 8 that are scattered all over our house. Because, we're ThinkPad people! My wife, ThinkPad T500, my son, ThinkPad T400, my daughter, ThinkPad X61, myself ThinkPad Xxxx. OK, you get the idea. I'm not terribly OCD, I'm just lazy. I don't want to move my adapter around as I go from place to place in the house. Oh.... guess what's at work? Yeah; ThinkPad L420! However, the irony of it, is that this prosaic little device also led me to exclude... a ThinkPad. The X1 Carbon... because it's thinness caused it to have a special (different than all other TPs) adapter! And that led me to...

"So, you didn't want an X1 so you bought and X1"? No; I'm not ready for the coo coo farm. I can't have an X1c (for Carbon), but I could have an X1 (1st gen). Like I could afford a "Carbon" anyway, but that's beside the point. So, here's the scenario: I'm looking around for something updated, but thin and light, AND wouldn't cause me to change peripherals. Oh yeah, and that I could afford! There's always that! In my examining the X1c (longingly) and finding it not quite the right fit (like that gorgeous girl in your Agronomy class that you never forgot, but I digress), I came across the original X1 which was the replacement for the X301 for those not up on ThinkPadology. Yes, it's bigger and heavier (by a whole, half a pound) than my X301. But it has USB 3.0 and a 13.3" screen that's not only brighter but also of a lower resolution (1366 x 768) than the X301 as well. I'm not sure I'm a big fan of the Corning "Gorilla Glass", but I can live with it.

As you can see; there's no optical drive, but the one I bought came with an external DVD burner. It is also the higher spec'd version with the 160Gb Intel SSD vs. a mechanical drive, so it was probably about $2000 give or take 2 and a half years ago when it was bought. Yup, it still has around 6 months of warranty left on it.

I'll put you out of your misery now. I give a hair over $305 (plus $26 2-Day shipping), and it's literally "mint", as in I can't find a mark on it, or the Lacie drive or the 2 power adapters or the Lenovo backpack that came with it. I've never bought a used computer that looked this new! 

Are there things I don't like? Yes. It's too big physically for a machine with a 13.3" screen, not huge, mind you, just a little too big. The 13" MacBook Air is better. The screen is very nice, but the resolution is a little low and the jury is still out on the glossy Gorilla Glass. Kinda don't like the 6-row vs. the traditional 7-row keyboard. HATE that some idiot decided that the headphone jack needed to be behind a rubber door! It runs a bit hot, but what doesn't these day? It's that I'm not used to a full power CPU (an i5 2520M in this case). It only came with 4Gb of RAM in one socket (vs. 2 normally). Only one of the 3 USBs is 3.0 and one is behind that stupid rubber door. Did I mention I hate the rubber door!?!

What do I like/love? Well.... LOOK AT IT!!! What's not to love!?! The people who have seen it pretty much have the same reaction.... WOW, it's really THIN! Oh, it's NOT silver. I really don't like eye-catching silver. The only thing wrong with the MBA. If it came in black you might be seeing me driving around with an Apple sticker on my truck.... OK, not really..... just sayin'. Anything else? Oh yeah, there's plenty. It's fast (well, duh you say), no it's really fast compared to the X301, The keyboard is great! It might be the best keyboard of any ThinkPad I've used since the legendary 600, and that's a company known for it's keyboards! Did I mention that it's back-lit as well? Not new for the Mac crowd, but nice for us plebes. The display is really bright and the 1366 x 768 is very kind to my aged eyes. It'll also nice to have an SD card reader onboard for when I'm using any of the cameras that uses that card. USB 3.0 is awesome. It's not as fast as Thunderbolt, but I'm so amazed by how much faster it is than 2.0, that I don't really care right now. Oh.... I love that it was $305! Which, by the way is about half of what I would have paid for an equivalent MacBook Air. After selling my X301, the cost of this upgrade will hover right around $0.... even after the 8Gb RAM upgrade on it's way from Israel!

The Mac Came Back

Three years ago (this month) I wrote a blog-post about a foray into Macs, and I don't mean British for a raincoat. As a quick recap, I had a client who's daughter was going to school at Baylor University, a school that's known for it's medical programs and was/is a "Mac Shop". Therefore, she wanted to have a MacBook just to make things easier. Well; earlier this year, she graduated, and while I was doing some work for them, I asked about the computer and whether she was upgrading now that she's gainfully employed. Some time later, the dad told me that she had indeed upgraded since, a few months ago, she had spilled a soft drink into the computer and it had promptly died! ..... and that I could have it if I liked. 

So, of course I liked; you know me.... I enthusiastically welcomed the rather bedraggled looking MacBook back home. And it absolutely looked like the proverbial thing that "the cat dragged in", with NO signs of life emminating from it when power was hooked up.

Let's began by looking at the specs. It's a "run-of-the-mill" 2009 White polycarbonate MacBook, which back then cost about $1000 in base trim. This particular machine had been upgraded to it's RAM max of 4Gb vs. the 2Gb standard so was worth more. In 2011 when I originally bought it, they were going in the $500 range. I picked it up for somewhat less than that with 6 months of Apple Care left to go. In those pre-"Core" days, it was a very nice machine. Today, given that it's equipped with the "Penryn" (45nm) generation Core 2 Duo, it's still a very useable computer, especially with 4Gb (or more) of RAM. The main chink in the armor though is the slow 160Gb/5400rpm hard drive. More on that later. 

So, what we have here was what used to be a pretty nice little laptop, but had been rendered useless from soda. Now, when you have a liquid spill, typically, everything doesn't die. If it's water or a few other things, sometimes, the entire machine can be rescued if power is removed and the liquid is flushed away and dried quickly. NONE of those things happened. It was a worse case scenario. Soda (acid AND sugar), NOT flushed away quickly. So the upshot is that the motherboard and in all likelihood any electronics in the base of the machine are irretrievable. However, it wasn't a lost cause. In all probability, the entire screen assembly was/is still good, maybe the drives, and possibly the RAM. The question was: how much work did I want to invest into this little laptop?

Two weeks of pondering and eBay watching netted me this. At $83 with free shipping, plus my conveniently timed "eBay Bucks" certificate brought this solution in at less than $70 spent. To make a long story shorter; it arrived yesterday afternoon, and an hour later, I had a working MacBook. The important thing about this was that the base was complete/working, only missing a few screws. So the old screen went right in, the RAM and hard drive transferred right over, the machine booted right up. End of story.... kind of....

During those two weeks of looking and contemplation, I decided that if I was going to resurrect this machine, I was going "whole hog". And in my world, that means SSD. As I've trumpeted many times before; nothing makes a machine feel fast as quickly as putting an operating system on an SSD! To that end, I bought a used Intel 160Gb SSD for $90, which brought total outlay to just under $160. I'll need to watch Craigslist and find somebody selling an OS X Snow Leopard, or Mountain Lion (maybe even Mavericks) load and get it finished for something like $175 invested. If that seems like a lot of money, it is, especially when compared to similarly spec'd Dell E6400s that I often pick up for between $100 and $125. But, equipped with an SSD, I'll be able to sell this machine for more than double what I put into it. That's the upside of Macs; they may be more expensive, but they have a higher resale value as well. In this case, somewhere between $300 and $400...... that's IF I sell it at all!

WHAT!!! Have I turned to the dark side!?! No, not yet, although I am carrying an iPhone these days (long story). Some time ago, my daughter's ThinkPad X61 died. I replaced it with a Z61t, but she rarely uses it since it's slower AND she's been using an iPad as well. ......Yes, we've succumbed to what my brother-in-law calls, the "gateway drug" of iOS. In fact, we have 4, count 'em, 4 iPads in our house these days! No, I don't use one. AND No, I'm not writing about this now! Back to the sad little girl without a laptop. Anyway; she's always been the different child, the happy bouncy one, the artistic one, .....the lefty. I've always thought that she'd be a Mac person when she got older. She's older now, so it might be time to move her over to a Mac. 

Why not me? Actually, I'm probably a perfect candidate to be a Mac guy. A little different than most people. Kind of a hardware snob. .....and I might..... at some point. There's been a number of times that I've come close to picking up one of the black MacBooks from the same generation as the one I just fixed. And if the 2011, black MacBook Air would have come to fruition, I'd of probably been done for, but neither happened. I do think though, that when the time comes to retire my trusty ThinkPad X301, it'll come down to the X1 Carbon, or an MBA (black or no black).