Out of the Dark......

I was up late last night (I really struggle with time changes), and while working on a few random things like getting my son's old X220 ready for sale, something appeared. OK, I was actually trying to find the X220 drive bay cover and while doing that, I was feeling around to see what was on one of the shelves of my workbench. And out comes this!

I had thought that I'd sold all the random X6x gen machines and parts! Yet, there it was; an X61 sitting on it's matching dock! I kept racking my brain for it's history while I pulled it in and check out whether it even worked. My thought process was rudely interrupted by a sequence of beeps telling me that it either didn't like the RAM, or there was none. A little screwdriver work, followed by some digging in the spare RAM box, and I was rewarded with a POST, followed by a message that it didn't have an OS. That'd be because, it didn't have a drive in it.... More parts box scrounging, which led to me reorganizing my entire stock of 2.5" hard drives..... told you I have trouble with time changes! After that detour, which led to another detour to put a Western Digital Blue 750Gb drive into my son's "new" laptop for "mass storage" purposes..... I came up with an Intel 80Gb, mSATA SSD in the weird 3.3v/1.8" form that I had sitting around. I had, had a number of them at one time because that's what the X300/X301 called for and since they are neither capacious or work in most machines which aren't ThinkPads, they've been collection dust. I'll do a separate post some time on those weird little drives. But in any case, since this was indeed a ThinkPad, and was in need of some sort of drive, I slipped it into a 2.5" adapter and put it in the X61. I invested another 45 minutes of sleep time into slapping an operating system on it to make sure it worked, then went to bed.

The light of day found the hard part rattling around in my head. What exactly does one do with a 8/9 year old laptop? So, let's look at the points of the argument and see what the issues are, OK? It's CPU is a Core 2 Duo T7100, which comes with integrated graphics as well. These are not good things. Not only does it not run current graphics well, it runs hot as well. In fact, this little guy is famous/infamous for running hot! The screen is XGA (1024 x 768). It's not that I'm a widescreen guy or anything, but this low resolution makes most web content which have stuff off to the side creates a scrolling issue! Oh yeah; and lots of that content is in Flash which bogs down older machines like this. Those are pretty big negatives! Are there positives as well?

You can see that, in comparison to a more "normal" sized machine, the X61 is small.... and light, like under 4lbs of light with the BIG, 9-cell battery! That gets really close to 3lbs when you can locate the 6-cell "ghost-battery". Did I mention that I have 2 of those? I think only one still works, but still....... 

After, all that scrutiny, what have I come up with? I think it'd make a great later-day "netbook". Something that a person who writes.... oh, say a Blogger, could just throw in a bag and use as a travel partner. Where most things are sync'd to the Cloud and you wouldn't sweat if it got "jacked". Oh, no, no..... I don't mean me! I don't travel anywhere near as often as I used to, and I don't get paid to blog, so it's not a fit for me. However, it'd be perfect for somebody like that though!