Ho John Lee’s Weblog

It’s been a few weeks now since I’ve started using a new IBM Thinkpad T42P as a replacement for my HP 4150B. Overall, I’m pretty happy with it. I’ve taken it on one trip to Asia and a few meetings so far, along with daily office use. The Omnibook 4150B has been a total workhorse, logging more than 500K air miles in 5 years. I’m still using it around the house, but the case has developed a hairline fracture which I suspect will not withstand another serious road trip, thus finally prompting a search for a replacement.

T42P good points:

Battery life - I routinely get more than 6 hours run time with the 9-cell battery
Weight - I got the 14″ rather than 15″ display to improve portability. It’s definitely lighter than the old Omnibook, and I’m carrying fewer extra widgets, which also saves weight.
Noise - HDDs have generally gotten quieter over the past few years, and the fan is also very quiet
Build quality - no loose plastic pieces, solid metal hinges, and very little chassis flex.
Think Light - this seemed a little gimmicky, but has actually turned out to be useful on the airplane
Built-in wireless - I got a unit with built in 802.11 a/b/g and Bluetooth. The performance of the 802.11 b and g modes has been quite good; I haven’t had an occasion to use the 802.11a mode yet. There’s no obvious way to connect an external antenna to the built-in hardware, but I can always put another radio in the PCMCIA slot. The IBM Connection Manager widget for managing roaming profiles also works pretty well so far

Undecided / not great:

Trackpad - the T42P has both a pointing stick and trackpad. I’ve never gotten the hang of using the trackpad reliably, so I’m on the verge of disabling it so I don’t keep bumping into it accidentally.
Fingerprint scanner - this is a cool concept, but I haven’t reached a level of comfort where I’m willing to rely on it to sign on instead of logging in the normal way.
No business card holder - this is nitpicky, but there’s no slot for placing a business card or other identifying marks on the unit. Obviously, putting your business card isn’t going to prevent people from stealing it, but it can help distinguish one computer from another — and there are a lot of similar looking computers around at airport security, conferences, meetings, etc.
Keyboard - the IBM keyboard “feel” is a little different, mostly good. However, I seem to do something from time to time that causes the keyboard to “beep” loudly when I type something rapidly/badly. It might be some control key combination, I haven’t figured this out yet.
Key placement - the IBM keyboard also swaps the usual placement of the Fn and Ctrl keys, and has a slightly different placement for the Esc key. I trip over this at least a couple of times a day. There’s a hack for swapping the keyboard mapping, but I haven’t tried this yet.
No recovery media - there is a recovery partition on the HDD, but if you upgrade the drive, or if you accidentally or intentionally trash the WinXP install, there’s no way to recover the factory install without contacting IBM support. I may request a set anyway, in anticipation of snags while setting up dual-boot Linux on the system.

To be fair, a lot of the improved experience I’m getting is in going from a 650MHz P3 with 256MB RAM to a 2.1GHz Pentium-M with 1GB RAM and a faster bus, and running a 7200RPM drive vs a 5400RPM drive, rather than any IBM (now Lenovo)-specific system design advantage. Similarly, the USB ports are 2.0 rather than 1.1, so the outboard peripherals are faster.

It’s depressing that it takes so much computing resource to mostly do nothing but run WinXP with OfficeXP with reasonable response time. I occasionally find myself SSHed into an antique Linux box running Emacs when I want to do serious text editing and it totally crushes Word for actual text manipulation power, sans formatting and nice print output. I’ve repartitioned the disk on the Thinkpad to leave room for a Linux install when I get some time for some tech hacking.

I’ll also put in a mention here for Bill Morrow, who hosts Thinkpads.com. The user forums there are the best online resource I’ve found for IBM Thinkpad info of all models and vintages, and with many posts by knowledgeable and motivated users.

I purchased my T42P from Bill rather than the IBM online store, in part because I had problems getting a system configured on the IBM site (similar to the problems I had earlier with the HP online store), and found his prices to be competitive while providing me some confidence that I was actually getting what I was trying to order.

In the end, what sold me on the Thinkpad this time around was a combination of the longer battery life and being able to order from Bill. The system performance, feature set, weight, and build quality for the HP nc6220 is generally similar, but the actual battery run time for the HP model is significantly shorter in both published reviews and anecdotal user comments. I was still considering just living with it, but I couldn’t get the HP web site to kick out the configuration I wanted, as it was convinced I wanted to buy one of the promotional configurations. The IBM site was slightly better, but I found it difficult to tell whether I was substituting one option for another, or getting an additional piece of equipment.

Bill stocks a variety of high end T42 configurations, and I was able to verify that he had what I wanted in hand, and received it overnight after placing the order. In theory this could have all been done, “friction-free”, on the internet, a la Dell. However, given the choice, I wouldn’t want to be 12,000 miles from home out in the boonies in India or China or wherever, and be counting on a semi-disposable computer. Sometimes you just need something that will hold up, and Dell isn’t it. Obviously, I was willing to pay more to get something more bulletproof. Here’s hoping for another 5 years of reliable service…

See also: Notebook Migration in Progress…, More on Notebook Computer Shopping

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 8th, 2005 at 11:49 am and is filed under Personal Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Tags: ibm, t42p, hardware, computers, hp, travel