Laptop | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

I just plugged in my mouse again. It’s so great. I do like the trackpoint as well but you can’t compare the two. Now I’m so used to the Trackpoint that I happen to forget to use the mouse.

Videos and documents of Computer Networks, LaTeX files, Gimp to edit the included images, a large map of Shanghai and Firefox with about 25 tabs (Shanghai Metro Map, apartments, …) were a bit too much for only one Gigabyte RAM. That problem had to be solved. And the owner of the computer store was right when he said he doesn’t sell memory without testing it. The first one we tried was incompatible with my ThinkPad.

But now it’s really, really fast… ok, back to work.

Took off the harddisk. In the external case I can transfer the most important files to the laptop and take the rest with me to China. With all my things gone, my computer feels so strange now.

I need some kind of laptop bag or sleeve. The interim solution of putting it in one plastic and two cloth bags may protect it but is not that easy to handle.

Thanks to Thanks to ThinkWiki nearly everything’s working now, even the fingerprint reader. But my poor little laptop got a defective pixel. 😢 And I’m in desperate need of clowns.

Ok, so I got a laptop, X61s, rid of Vista and have been trying to install Ubuntu for two days now… without success. When I boot from a copied live CD, the installer reports defective files, a netinstall doesn’t work from home and when I try to install from the ISO file the thing reports a defective CD. But there is no CD and the MD5 hash of the file is correct. Arg.

A friend thinks that a new MacBook is nonsens and I should rather get an old 12 inch ThinkPad and install a 8 or 16 GB solid state disk. 16 GB… Actually it’s only 14,9 GB as the conversion factor is 1024, not 1000 (1 GB = 1024 MB). That would only be 2,9 % of the available space on my desktop computer.

And there’s no optical drive. Hm. If I wouldn’t go to China I could once again wait for Apple to introduce its ultra-portable what’s now supposed to happen at Macworld Expo in January.

I was about to buy a MacBook when I stumbled upon AppleDefects. Now I think it might be better to get an old ThinkPad rather than a new MacBook…

Still trying to find out which laptop to get, I went to a local store and took a look at the macbooks. They didn’t have the newest ones but some mid-2007 machines with Tiger.

The one I tested had the speech recognition application running and so I really talked to the macbook and it answered. I asked for the time, the date and actually a joke. I have to admit that I didn’t get the joke. I might have been expecting too much.

Apple released Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard yesterday but didn’t announce any new products yet. Three weeks ago, AppleInsider had reported:

Apple Inc. has begun preparatory measures for significant announcements to take place during the last full week of October, AppleInsider has been told.

While sources have requested that we not go into detail regarding the specific measures being put into place, they say the announcements are likely to arrive any time between the 22nd and 27th of the month.

So let’s hope they’ll present something today.

I’ve been getting into Apple and Mac OS X for the last days. I might even get this rumored MacBook should it come true.

Today I tried the Mighty Mouse. Odd design but the touch sensor buttons really work. At first I thought it would be some kind of touchpad but you can click it like any other mouse and it decides which click (right or left) to perform on whether you touch the left button or not. It’s very comfortable to use but lacks one important feature: mouse chording.

Lenovo Worldwide Competitive Analyst Matt Kohut published two interesting posts on his blog. He first wants to figure out if and why people would want Linux on a ThinkPad and asks for the prefered distribution in the follow up.

I can’t say I’m unhappy that Ubuntu is leading the field with 47 % of all votes. The chances increase that they will offer a laptop as desired.

I can’t take my desktop computer to Shanghai so I have to look for a laptop. I’d like to get a ThinkPad but couldn’t figure out yet how to customize a model instead of just buying one. It works on the US site, why not on the German one?

And why do I have to spend money on Windows Vista?? I’m very happy with my Ubuntu Linux and even if I’d want to use Windows (what I don’t) I could get a free and legal copy from my university. Praise Dell that offers computers with Ubuntu.

I’m also thinking about getting a cheap laptop from a discounter which I’d use at home where size, weight and battery life won’t matter and try to find a small used ThinkPad at eBay. But then I can just as well get another desktop computer in China… Anyone competent around?