Gadgets

In the past few months, I had the opportunity to play with three different notebooks. For those in the process of choosing a new notebook for themselves and also to always remind me of an important lesson, I would like to share my experiences.

Notebook 1: Lenovo Thinkpad T61

What do you think when you hear "Thinkpad"? I, for one, used to think: IBM, ugly, but rock-solid. Or at least that's what I've heard from others using them, and on the almighty internet. The T61 was the first time for me to use a Thinkpad myself.

Hardware

Oh my gooooooooood, is this thing ugly! Clearly, the rumours were all true. All improvements in industrial design that have been made in the past decade completely went by the Thinkpad line of products. Also, the keyboard layout is a work of the devil! It took me a whole week not to constantly make typos, accidentally delete stuff or send instant messages before I was finished writing them. Clearly not fun. If the notebook is mainly used at the office or home office, do yourself a favour and get and external keyboard! Another downside: It's quite heavy compared to other notebooks in its class. Upsides: Very fast. Performs really well for a notebook, which surprised me a bit since IBM computers where never known for mindboggling performance. But hey, it's not IBM anymore, it's Lenovo now.

Installing Linux

As I am not a Windows user, I quickly got rid of that pre-installed monstrosity and installed Ubuntu Linux, which was at version 7.10 at the time. Almost everything worked out-of-the-box, except for three things: Sound, WiFi, and the internal card-reader. From my previous experience with notebooks and card readers, I knew that chances of getting that one to work where near zero, and since I have an external USB card reader, I opted not to bother. Getting sound to work on the T61 was a bit difficult for reasons that I cannot recall. Also, it was a bit tricky - sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn't. After many hours of searching the web and configuring stuff, it seemed to work somewhat reliably, only to stop working again after installing some software updates. Rinse, repeat. WiFi, on the other hand, was a bit easier to setup initially. This was to be expected, as the Centrino chipset is quite well supported on Linux. There was only one problem: The WiFi connection only lasted for about a minute, then dropped dead again, claiming no access point was in range. WTF? The access point was in the same room. Let's try again... ah, good, there's the connection again. A minute later the connection was dropped once again. Rinse, repeat. I found no way to get stable WiFi access, so cable remained the only reliable option. Not funny. All in all, at this point I thought it was just an incompatibility thing with Linux and the specific hardware used. Oh, you just wait...

Notebook 2: Lenovo Thinkpad R61

Huh? Didn't we just discuss that one? No, we didn't - it's the R-series now, as opposed to the T-Series. This one came with Windows Vista Business pre-installed, which was also the first time for me I really had to use Vista instead of just assisting some poor soul who asked me to solve his Windows troubles. This time installing Linux was not an option, as the notebook owner insisted that I used the pre-installed system. Oh well, after three years of nearly complete abstinence it's back to Redmond for me, then.

Hardware

The R61 is just as ugly as the T61 - who would have guessed? The only difference is that the display is in widescreen format this time and there are slightly different components. It doesn't feel equally fast as the T61 though. I don't know the exact differences in hardware between the two (I only care about RAM, all modern processors are more than adequate for my line of work, so I don't care about the rest) so maybe it's because of CPU speed, or it's just because of all the bloat Windows Vista brings to the table - I don't know (I have my suspicions, though ). Battery life also seemed way shorter than that of the T61. Again, Windows may be the culprit here. Everything else is just like the T61, including the dreadful keyboard layout.

Problems I didn't expect to have when using a pre-installed OS

When I buy a computer with an operating system pre-installed, I expect this particular combination of hard- and software to just work out-of-the-box. No problems, nothing unexpected should ever happen. Never would I have guessed I could be so wrong. The WiFi is still just as flaky as with Linux on the T61. First the AP is there, then it's not. Again: WTF? "Hey, your access point is broken, get a new one", one could argue, but I have four more devices in this house that disagree with that theory, thank you very much. So once again, it's back to cable. What a waste. But now for the really annoying stuff: Energy saving features. I have seen notebooks before where sometimes the machine wouldn't be able to properly recover state when waking up from suspend mode. With the R61, however, I only even got the machine to suspend to disk for about two or three times, and that was when I first started using it. Now, when I go to suspend mode (either by choosing the option from Windows or shutting the display, doesn't really matter), the machine will write the content of the memory to disk, fine, power down, aah, fine, and... and then power back up. WTF???? When I went into suspend mode by shutting the display, it will even detect that the display is still shut and deduct that I would like to suspend again once Windows has come up. Thus, immediately after waking up, it will power down again, only to automagically wake up, boot Windows, detect the shut display, go into suspend.... rinse, repeat. Infinite loops are great, really. That's not the only problem though. After a few minutes of not using the notebook, it will go into standby mode. That's all good and fine, but sometimes it won't wake up from standby again. This means, I have to power down the machine despite a number of applications already running, some with open documents (that I can only hope have been written to disk before). No clean shutdown for you tonight, boys. Even worse, the machine will go into standby even though I configured it never to do that when the power chord is attached. WTF?!?!? And just to put the icing on the cake, I've encountered several occasions where I left the device alone for just a few minutes and come back only to see that in the meantime, it has rebooted. By itself. With. No. Fucking. Reason. At. All. Add to that the general instability and sluggishness of Windows Vista and you can see that I am not a happy camper. I would even say that this box causes more trouble than it's worth.

Notebook 3: Dell Inspiron 1525

A friend of mine used to use Dell notebooks for years with Gentoo Linux, which seemed a combination that worked without too much trouble. Since Dell now offers notebooks with Ubuntu Linux pre-installed, I decided to give it a try, as my wife needed a notebook for work.

Hardware

Ooooh, what a beauty. Clearly lightyears ahead of the ugly Lenovo offerings. Sleek, silver casing, and a top cover whose color you can choose yourself (the wife opted for dark blue, with looks really cool with the silver contrast). The keyboard layout is pretty much the same as the one from my old Toshiba notebook, which I had always loved for being so similar to a regular-sized keyboard. Big enter key, meaningful alignment of extra keys, nice typing. Really, really good. First impression of speed is very good, quite similar to the T61. Also it has one GB of extra RAM compared to the Lenovo notebooks (3GB total). Battery life is excellent, the most I got out of any notebook I ever laid my hands on (about 3:40h with what I'd call "normal usage", perhaps a bit more hard disk access and WiFi traffic than the average user). The notebook is also a lot thinner and lighter than the Lenovo ones. One downside though: It has a glossy screen. I don't like 'em, there are too many reflections. Only after the order was placed did I learn that I could have ordered a plain screen, had I ordered by phone. Why on earth don't they offer that option on the website, if that's possible??

Linux impressions

No need to install Linux this time, as it came pre-installed. Remember what I said earlier, when I buy a machine with a pre-installed OS, I expect everything to just work? Guess what? This is absolutely true for the Dell Inspiron with Ubuntu Linux. I pressed the power button and it just worked. All of it. Including Sound, including WiFi (eat this, Lenovo ) and even including the internal card reader (which was a first for me when it comes to Linux and notebook card readers). Even some otherwise proprietary codecs like Quicktime and Windows Media came pre-installed, just like LinDVD, a commercial DVD playing software. So it's unlikely that anyone will be surprised not being able to play his favourite media files just because he bought a notebook with Linux on it. Well done, Dell! The only downside: Just a month before the Dell machine shipped, Ubuntu 8.04 was released - obviously a one-month time-span is not enough for Dell to ship the latest version (I always thought Dell machines are built-to-order, so it shouldn't be a problem of selling the old stock first?). Thus, an update to 8.04 had to be done. I was extremely afraid of doing that, given that the pre-installed system ran so well. But everything went quite smoothly and still works as expected after the upgrade. There was a small problem with sound not being played, but it's a known problem which Dell already addressed in its Linux FAQ, just uninstall the modem driver and you have sound again (no, this doesn't make any sense at all... but it works and who needs an analogue modem these days?).

Lessons learned

Dell rocks. The hardware is cool (no actually it gets pretty warm, but you get the point), everything just works as you think it should, no surprises. And not having to bother with codec licensing on Linux is a definite plus. Lenovo, on the other hand, clearly is not IBM. The quality standards don't match what you would expect from a Thinkpad of IBM reputation, which is why I think handing over the brand to Lenovo was a big mistake for IBM. Many people still associate the Thinkpad brand with IBM and I wouldn't be surprised if disappointment with the quality of the newer models would still reflect on IBM as well. To put it in other words: Lenovo sucks. The hardware is ugly, heavy and clumsy and has a bad usability. Add to that that it's overall buggy and has compatibility problems with both Linux and Windows (and obviously also doesn't play well with at least some types of WiFi access points), even when the latter comes pre-installed including all the necessary drivers, and given that it comes at almost double the price than equivalent (but excellent) Dell hardware, then all one can do is stay away from these beasts as far as possible and place a big warning sign in front of them if you ever see one. Which is what I hope to have achieved with this post.