Recently in Thinkpad Category

I'm very interested in Dag Wieers' recent post on why he chose a Lenovo Thinkpad X200s as his new laptop.

Using what developers use is always a good idea. Chances are that more things will work at the beginning, and then it will only get better as those developers start fixing what's broken.

Among the interesting features on the X200s:

• 80 GB solid-state hard drive
• Small and light, yet with full-size keyboard
• Complete hardware-maintenance manual available (VERY important, since laptops tend to break)
• Trackpoint instead of touchpad (I really like the trackpoint on my Compaq Armada 7700dmt; both the functionality and the saving of space with no touchpad) Wi-fi, Bluetooth, fingerprint reader, media-card reader (it would be great if this all worked under Linux)

I really liked this Computerworld piece on how to revitalize a five-year-old Thinkpad laptop for $125.

While an IBM Thinkpad is worthier of restoration than most, the fact is that if you have a laptop on hand, a little maintenance can give it quite a bit of extra life.

Among the things Brian Nadel did to his Thinkpad R50:

• Added memory
• Replaced hard drive
• Reinstalled Windows
• Got second hard-drive caddy and installed Ubuntu on original hard drive so he can switch from Windows to Ubuntu by pulling and replacing the caddy
• Replacing a damaged keyboard
• Cleaning the inside, outside and especially the fan
• Defragmenting the hard drive