ThinkPad T430s: The Source of My Computing Happiness

 

You can call me jaded, or simply a "crackpot", but I've gotta say, that I'm pretty happy these days. In the last post, I discuss my return to my computing roots by migrating from the X1 (not "Carbon") to the T430s. However, that post mostly discuss the philosophical/emotional sense of why making that move was a comfort zone thing for me and I really didn't discuss the machine much at all. Today, I'm going to get as close to reviewing a product as I ever get. So, here goes.

Let's start with a history lesson. My first ThinkPad was a 701c "Butterfly", which as an engineering "tour de force", but not really a full every day working machine. After a couple of years in the late 90's of using it as a coffee shop machine, I bought myself my first true ThinkPad love, the 600. It was just the perfect size to get work of all kinds done and was absolutely a "no compromise" machine. It's build quality was probably the high-water mark of all ThinkPads back in the day when IBM could and did charge $4000-5000 a-pop for their high-end machines.

Over time, I progressed to the T20 line that succeeded the 600, ultimately owning all the models in succession; T20, T21, T22p, and my favorite, the T23p. If you'll note the "p" suffix; it stands for "professional", and significantly for me, the model with a "high resolution" LCD panel, which at the time was 1400 x 1050. That's when I fell for the concept of high pixel density and screen real estate in the mid-sized (14") panel. I actually hung on to the T23p for quite some time, refusing to upgrade to the next series.

But, eventually, I gave in and moved on to the T4x Series. This next evolution was not only thinner (arguably started the current trend of "ultra-thin" notebooks), but marked Intel's return to power efficiency after the dead-end of using the P4 in notebooks. That was such a dark time that I'm choosing to not depict the T30 that I owned for less than a year! I would go on to have a T40, T41p, and (again my favorite of that generation) the last of model T42p. Yes, I'm aware that there was a T43, but I don't count that since it was really a cobbled together "transition" machine with a weird chipset that used a SATA hard drive on a PATA board! I feel better now... Oh yeah; then there was a the problems with the transition to lead-free solder as mandated by the Europeans which led to BGA issues with the ATI graphics processors. I was so put off by all this, I diverged onto the "X Series" for several years. 

Those were really nice machine, and in many ways reminescent of the "600" years, especially the 13" panels. Then the larger "X Series" went the "designer" route and.....

..... I 'm back. Back to where I started. The "mid-sized" machine that has all the more typical features without being too big or heavy to carry around. So, let's look at why this is a great machine for me. Let's start with the keyboard. I'm not wild about the layout, but it's the best "feel" (subjectively of course) of any ThinkPad I've owned since the 600x. I miss the page forward/back functions, but I like the optional back-lit, and the Delete key being on the end vs. in the middle of the keys. I really like the fact that it still has actual buttons for volume, mute and mic. I will never own a T440 because of Lenovo's ill-fated design mis-step of removing the mousing buttons. It was so poorly received, the they were restored the very next model in the Tx5x machines!

Other specs that I really love? Here's a list for ya:

• Way more screen real estate in 1600 x 900 vs. the 1366 x 768 on my X1. This is a really big deal to me! And on this screen, are honest to gosh latches! I like the old style ThinkPads where the fit of the lid became part of the rigidity of the entire unit when the machine is carried. The latchless screens are just something I didn't prefer. They simply didn't feel solid to me. These are like closing the door on a high-end German car.
• On board optical drive. Although I rarely used it, I like having it there. Especially since the penalty for it's inclusion is only a few ounces more weight AND virtually No footprint gain at all.
• UltraBay. This feature not only gave me the optical drive, but a flexible platform to put in another battery, or another hard drive. You might be wondering ..... why, on a machine that has the OS living in an 512Gb mSATA SSD, and a 2.5" SATA-3 bay holding a 600Gb SSD!?! It's not for storage. It's really so that when I'm at a client location, I can throw a client's drive into an adapter and access data as necessary. This is a bigger deal than you might think. I've found that, on failing drives, when an external enclosure fails to get it going, having it mount internally will often do the trick.
• Replaceable main battery is something I prefer. I know I can replace the internal battery in an "ultrabook", but I'd prefer to be able to just carry around a spare if I want/need to. 

And that I get all this at 3.9 vs. 3.7 pounds of the X1 is basically no penalty at all for me. Am I going to be able to tell the difference between the Sandy Bridge i5-2520m of the X1 to the i5-3320m of the T430s? I doubt it. I will say this (as small as it might sound), I'm really going to enjoy not having to pull out the rubber cover over the headphone jack though! This might be the single most annoying "feature" on the X1! What am I giving up? Probably the "cache" of owning a design-intensive "halo" product. But you know what? I'm 55! My days of wanting a product with "cache" are well-over..... if it ever was a thing in my world anyway...... 

My Electronic "Comfort Zone"

Today is literally the "last day of summer" for me. Tomorrow, I go back to work (not that today's teacher really has the summer off like they used to). So, it's appropriate that I'm "going home"..... in an electronic sense anyway...... 

Some of you might remember several years ago when I moved to the first of ThinkPad's real designer machines, the X300. They were super-thin (almost as thin as the MacBook Air of that era), but unlike the "MBA" had all the normal features plus the philosophy of the traditional ThinkPads: everything from screen latches, to every port under the sun and even squeezed in an optical drive that others were abandoning. This of course led to the X301, and then.....

..... the X1 (1st Generation), which is really a black MacBook Air that runs Windows. They went so far as to even put a rubber cover over the headphone jack and one of the USB ports. There were no access panels on the bottom, and the battery wasn't interchangeable. An "Ultra-Book" right in line with Intel's spec for that design philosophy. I used it for close to 2 years and just never became comfortable with it. Sure, most people who saw it, love it. But, in the end; it wasn't me!

So, today.... on the last day of summer (appropriately), I switch back to a traditional ThinkPad. It's a T430s. Yes, I'm aware that it's almost as thin as the X1 and that it's only the Ivy Bridge update to the Sandy Bridge generation processor (not even a full "tick-tock" of Intel's clock), and yes it has a "Chiclet" keyboard as well. But it's attitude is all "old school" ThinkPad! There's not a cover to be seen anywhere, it's thin, but it's about as squared-off as the the 765 above! AND..... there are LATCHES for the screen. The last ones of the line. None of the successors of the "Xx40", or "Xx50" line have them. Under the skin, it's very much like the X1. So much so, that it's OS is sitting on the 512Gb mSATA SSD that came out of the X1. It'll even get the 600Gb Intel 320 SSD as it's storage drive as well. The optical drive is back in an honest-to-goodness UltraBay. I'll probably pick up a 3-Cell battery to go in there in case I need more runtime, and an HDD adapter as well..... just in case 1.1Tb of SSD storage isn't enough!

And because it's a full-fledged working ThinkPad, there are Docks for it! I have the middle one; the Mini Dock Plus Series 3. 

Appropriately enough, I traded my Apple Watch for the T430s. Why "appropriately"? The same reason that the T430s is me and the X1 isn't. I'm not a coolest gadget guy. I use things as a tool, first and foremost. I just need them to make me more efficient. It's not that I'm too "old school" to use a smartwatch..... 

...... but this (the original Pebble) is my smartwatch. The simplest, might be the cheapest on the market. Why? Because it does everything I want it to do and nothing more and because of that, it has the longest run-time between charge of them all. 

I also appreciate the company. They keep improving their product instead of trying to make you buy a new one! Although they've come out with several since the original, when I charged it up last night when I made the deal for the T430s, that they had completely new software for it.... which improved it..... free of charge! Hopefully, you didn't miss that I was able to trade the Apple Watch for the ThinkPad! That's straight up 1 for 1. I had previously traded an old Core 2 Duo generation MacBook that I had trouble selling for that watch. So I tried out the watch throughout the summer and was ready to move on.....

The main reason I was ready to give up the Apple Watch? (other than the fact that I did't use 10% of the features). I'm about to give up my iPhone. Long story, but the short version is that it's going to my wife to replace her's. Does this mean that I'm about to buy myself a really cool new phone? One of those Samsungs that have the wrap-around screen? Ah.....No.

I went into my office closet and dusted off my wife's old Motorola Atrix HD from before we got the iPhones 2 years ago. That mean that this phone is something like 3-4 years old!?! Yup! I looked at it and it does pretty much everything that I need it a phone to do. It's that simple. 

If you've gotten the impression that this whole post has been about me getting back into the electronic version of my comfort zone, you'd be right. Although, I'm not exactly Mark Zuckerberg, this picture is completely appropriate for me. My favorite season is Fall, when I can wear my favorite closes.... jeans and sweats! The "last day of summer" is very symbolic of that for us teachers when we go back and get ready for the "fall semester". This year, it's going to be even more comfortable than most!

The Portable Workstation

Going back to the beginning, my very first laptop computer that is, I've always had a bit of an obsession with "ultra-portability" and the concept of the portable/mobile workstation. I'll define that here as being a computer and peripherals having the capability of doing jobs that are generally considered to be within the province of full-sized desktop computers. I'll have to say that I was able to get started in good style with the IBM ThinkPad 701c (sometimes known as the butterfly). As machine so small that a full-sized keyboard was too large for, and had to be able to fold and unfold into!

As cool and interesting as that machine was though, it wasn't really the whole story. I took the concept to another level by finding the IBM 5183 Portable Printer along with the Logitech Scanman II to pair with it. This gave me be the capability of pretty much doing anything I wanted, anywhere I wanted, without even an electrical outlet. If you're unfamiliar with the computer, it's really smaller than what the image would indicate. That screen is only 10.4"! So this whole rig pretty much fit in a regular sized computer bag and weighed no more than just a more normal sized laptop by itself. I was hooked!

In the years after that, my portable machines grew as they progressed from legendary 600, then on to the the "T" Series. I was happy with these machines, but often would lament the lack of extreme portability that the "Butterfly" had given me. Then one day the ThinkPad folks dropped the X300 bomb on us! When the price for them finally came back down to earth, I bought a nice used one several years ago. 

 

This became the core of my "next-gen" portable workstation. It paired nicely with Canon LIDE scanner that I had at the time and I even dabbled in the Pentax Portajet thermal printer (the world's smallest printer). The idea received it's most significant use and "proof-of-concept" when tragically my mother-in-law passed away due a car accident during the holidays one year. I had the whole rig with me at the time since we were vacationing with my in-laws and I was scanning some family photos for them. That scanner got quite a workout putting together a memorial from old photographs for the funeral.

Around that time, I added another element to my little bag of tricks by adapting the recently acquired Android ThinkPad Tablet to work as a secondary screen to the laptop (which had been upgraded to the X301). This gave me a portable multi-monitor setup like I was used to at home. 

The 3rd generation of my portable workstation came about when the X3xx machines gave way to the X1. On one hand, I gave up having a built-in optical drive (which I haven't missed at all), but on the other, I gained a much nicer (and larger at 14.1" vs. 13.3") screen (the X3xx machines had notoriously bad panels), but at a resolution (1366 x 768) much kinder to my aging eyes. Although it's a 2nd gen (Ivy Bridge) Core processor, and has other upgrades such as USB 3.0 as well; it's most important function is as the "core" (forgive the pun) to the new version of portable "eco-system" if you will.

Recently, I was to again add the ability to print on the move with the HP OfficeJet H470 printer. I actually gave about $30 (after shipping) for 2, H470s and 1, H460, along with power supplies for all three as well as 2 batteries. One of the H470s has an unresolved issue, but the other one works as does the H460 that I'll probably sell to defray the cost of the whole thing. A Bluetooth wireless module ($10) is on it's way from China to allow me to go fully wireless printing. 

 

 

Of course there are other smaller items such as the Bluetooth travel mouse, the nVidia Shield tablet and the Wacom Bamboo pen digitizer that gives me other capabilites as well.

 

Those things are great, but the biggest change in this generation has to be the ability to bring massive storage to the portable realm. About a year ago, I picked up the Lenovo F800 "Multi-Drive". Essentially an access point, attached to a lithium-iom "power station", combined with a 1Tb hard drive, it gives me the ability to have a wireless NAS wherever I go. As if that wasn't enough, I picked up a Drobo Mini last summer and populated it with 4 laptop sized (2.5") drives (2, 1.5Tb & 2, 1Tb), giving me the capability to carry 5Tb of USB 3.0 attachable storage with me anywhere. This weekend, I put the 600Gb Intel 320 SSD from my wife's old laptop into the other bay of the X1. This combined with the mSATA, 480Gb SSD, gives me a total of around 1Tb of "onboard" storage, and 6Tb of either attached or wireless storage. If you'd have told me that I'd be able to do this affortably even 2 years ago; I'd have said that it was "crazy talk"!

That's a lot of cool portable stuff right!?! ....but there's more! Oh, I don't own any of it, but ..... one day..... What is it? It's the ThinkPad "Stack". What's the pieces in the Stack? One is a lithium-ion power station, another is a Bluetooth speaker, then you a portable access point, and of course, the last (so far) is a portable HDD. Each is about the size of one of those portable drives you can buy anywhere, but the cool thing about this is that they're all the same footprint and can connect to each other without wires or cables! OK; it doesn't do anything that I can't already do, but it does it in a much nicer way! I can be a little OCD.

Being Grateful For What I Have

I hope those of you who read this blog on a regular basis don't get the wrong impression! Despite my various posts, my life is not one long series of new, ever cooler gadgets! A lot of it is just me trying to keep up with the fast pace of modern technological change and to do so without having to expend what I consider to be ridiculous money. In reality, I often sit in wonder at what my modest income has been able to afford me. 

My daily driver "workstation" is an "Ivy Bridge" generation i7 with a Crucial half-terabyte SSD and 32Gb of RAM along with 3 more terabytes of mass storage. All this goodness resides in the Cooler Master Cosmos II Ulber-Case and attached to 4 pretty nice Lenovo ThinkVision monitors which affords me enough desktop real estate to do pretty much whatever I want without having programs double up in space. I use it every day and have never been frustrated in not being able to do ANYTHING! It's pretty much perfectly suited for my needs. 

However, for me, my real prize is the ThinkPad X1. No it's not the later carbon fiber model. It's the original one built around the "Sandy Bridge" i5. Spec-wise, it's not all that impressive. The screen's 1366 x 768, 13" The CPU is of course 3 generations old now, and being "non-carbon" means that it's significantly heavier as well. However, there's hardly anything I don't love about it. It's thin and light in the real sense of those words. The screen is a nice size and low enough resolution for my aging eyes to be able to see well. The SSD, and 8Gb of RAM make it fully capable of everything that I use it to do. As soon I pry her old T500 out of my wife's fingers, it will get a 600Gb Intel 320 SSD in the 2.5" drive bay. Last night I cloned it's Crucial M4, 256Gb mSATA SSD onto a Crucial, 480Gb M500. While that was going on, it occurred to me that never in my wildest dreams did I ever think I'd be able to own a cutting edge design notebook computer with over a Terabyte of solid state storage in it!

From The Ridiculous To The Sublime!

 

It's pretty much all over, but the "cry'in".... With the exception of "mass storage" and I do mean MASS, as in 2Tb or over.... the day of the spinning hard disk drive is over. With the price that they're at today, there's absolutely no reason to not have one in your machine. If you keep an eye out for the constant sales going one, it's not even that challenging to find a 240/256Gb SSD for under a $100! And I don't mean one of those "no-names". I'm talking Sandisk, Mushkin, Crucial, and even some Samsung. It really hit home last week when I was replacing a failed hard drive for a client. I had done some estimates for him between $200 on the low end and $375 on the high of the range from using a "small" (240Gb) SSD for the OS and programs and using first his onboard SD reader for file storage then on to the mSATA later. He decided to go this route because the 1Tb SSDs are still too expensive. While I was shopping for a good drive and SD card, I realized that I could do a 480/512Gb SSD for the combined cost of the original concept! I was able to pick up a Micron C400, 480Gb drive for just short of $140. Sure it's "last gen", but still a nice drive and a huge upgrade from his failing mechanical 500Gb Hitachi HDD. And since his ThinkPad T430 has an onboard mSATA connector, he'll be able to add one of those for more internal storage down the road.

Speaking of....  while shopping for his drive, I came across one of these. A Crucial M500 mSATA drive of 480Gb capacity for $149. I picked it up and plan on cloning the 256Gb, Crucial M4 in my ThinkPad over to it.

In addition, I'm going to take the 600Gb, Intel 320 that was in my wife's (now retired) ThinkPad T500 and put it in the 2.5" drive bay of the X1 giving me over a Terabyte of solid state storage in a sub-1", sub-5lb Ultrabook! Sure, that drive is a SATA-II, but it's file storage, so I think it'll be "OK". I'm not even sure what to do with all that storage, but hey; it's there if I need it!

In the middle of this, my wife's new machine, a ThinkPad T530, got a 480Gb, Intel Pro 2500. Not the fastest SSD, but dead reliable. 

So, what does all this SSD shuffling tell you? Am I just nuts? Maybe, but it's really that the capacity of today's solid state drives have them in a place to replace virtually all mechanical drives not used in mass storage. Here's the telling thing: in no case, did I pay more than $150 for any of these drives! And additional benefit? They are so fast, that just the one change, allows machines that are several years old to be completely usable and even down-right fast and inexpensive! There's just NO reason to still be running a machine with a mechanical hard drive!

Frugal Propellerhead Goes to Disney World

So; at long last; the Frugal Propellerhead meets the Disney Experience.... Oh, I don't mean the go to Disneyland for the day type of experience. That's more like a really, nicely done Six Flags. Nooooo..... I mean the full blown go to Disney World for a week immersion! It's no secret among my friends that I've never been a Disney kind of a guy. In fact, I'm famously anti-Disney. Just not a big believer in the sugar-coated perfect world structured for the upper-middle-class. Don't believe me? Go there and watch the people (and their behaviors), then compare that to the your last trip to the various Six Flags of the world. See..... But no, this is not a post on the sociological aspects of modern America and Disney's role in it, it's a post about our trip and how technology was part of it, as is the purpose of this Blog.

So how does anyone (much less a Propellerhead) deal with this? 

 

It starts with these two indispensible items. Your Magicband from Disney and your smartphone. Android, IOS doesn't matter. Getting the Disney experience App does. If you are planning on getting the full experience of several days and stay "on property" (more on this later), the Magicband is pretty much mandatory.

Yeah, that's what all it does. It completely eliminates the need to carry a wallet...... plus it tracks everything you do (as well as facilitate it) for Disney. So, it's not for the paranoid amongst you. But frankly, it's a bit of genius and works well. My personal favorite thing about it? It's your room key so you don't have to make sure to give the kids "the card" when they come and go! If you stay at one of the Disney properties, it really is like a magic key that does everything. And if you intend on doing the multiple day thing, I'd highly recommend staying "on property" and taking full advantage of all the Disney conveniences such as the transportation, food service (which was very good), and even little things such as having your purchases sent to your resort for pick up. Loved it! 

As far as the App goes, it allows you to manage your experience the whole time....in real time! Meaning you can see when your next appointment is that you have booked a "FastPass" time, where it's located, while helping you find it through the map function using GPS. My wife, who's the planner, kept her App (and us) going all the time! You can even manage your eating reservations on it as well (also, more on that later). The downside of course that all you who've used Smartphone apps that are GPS intensive is that it eats battery charge like nobody's business!

Which leads to this thing..... What is it? It's what they are calling, a "power station" these days, and this one is the EC Technologies 2nd Gen Deluxe 22400mAh Ultra High Capacity "Power Station". It'd highly recommend it. Why?

If you can extrapolate by comparing it to either the iPad or the coffee cup; you can see that it's huge! Why this monstrocity!?! Well.... the 22400mAh requires no explanation. For a "power station" that number is huge (and apparently accurate) as well. We were able to use it virtually the entire week mostly recharging my wife's phone (and occasionally mine as well) without having to recharge it at all. The thing finally gave out the last 2 days of the trip. Oh yeah; it's CHEAP!!! $36.99 from Amazon. How is it so cheap? It has very few features on it at all, just the USB ports, charge indicator lights and a flashlight LED, plus it's not a well know company. I did do my research before buying it of course, and the reviews are excellent across the board. One reviewer even took it apart and found that it used top notch batteries and commented that it was cheap enough to even consider buying to take the individual cells out, but was too useful to do so! One caveate though; it's big and kinda heavy. So if you aren't carrying a decent sized pack (I was), then it will weigh you down with it's 15.36 oz weight!

 

If there were anything else that was indispensible, it was these 2 items. The top of course, was my ThinkPad X1 which happily greeted me at the beginning and end of each day. I used it for the normal stuff in the few minutes I had at thoses times and not much more needs to be said about it since I've written on it in past posts. The other item, I've touched on a little previously, but not in detail, so I'll talk more about it here. It's my Lenovo F-800 "Multi-Mode" Drive. Here's what it does: it's a 1Tb USB 3.0 external drive, WiFi access point (via the Ethernet port), WiFi streaming device (of media files stored in it's shared folder) either to computers logged on to it or Smartphones/Tablets running it's App.....oh yeah, it is also self-powered with it's internal battery as well as able to charge other devices as a charge station! We used almost all of those functions! On the roughly day and a half car trip, it served up movies to the children via their iPads in the back seat. No more cords! At Disney, I used it as a "dump station" for when I filled up the camera's memory cards (I carried 5). In some of the hotels, we used it as an Internet access point if the WiFi signal wasn't very strong. It's been so useful, it has replaced the HooToo Tripmate Nano which requires external power and found a permanent place in my technology bag! It's list price is $250, but I got mine on "special" directly from Lenovo for $100.

 

There was one other little thing..... we drove the hour or so East to Cape Canaveral to see the Kennedy Space Center. Let's just say that it was amazing and for someone like me (born in 1960) it fulfills one of my "bucket-list" items. The Atlantis exhibit was most impressive and brought back memories of the Challenger and Columbia which made me emotional.

Is there more to say? You bet, but that needs to be in another post where I'll discuss the various issues of photographing the Disney vacation!