Introduce my new toy — a Lenovo ThinkPad T410. I have been a Dell man for the last 10 years — having a total of 3 Dell laptops (Inspiron 8000, Latitude D600 and Latitude D630). Well now I am having a change and migrated off Malaysian product to Chinese product :) Built quality is probably on par comparing to Dell Latitudes, but a good $500-$1000 cheaper on a similar configured system, thanks to regular Lenovo bargains that are up to 35% off.

Spec of my new toy work horse

• Intel Core i5 580M
• 4GB memory
• 320GB SATA HDD with 7200RPM
• NVIDIA Quadro NVS3100M graphics
• Windows 7 Professional 64bit
• DVD-RW, 2.0MP webcam, Intel 802.11bgn, and all the works
• Legendary Lenovo ThinkPad keyboard with UltraNav

Since I am doing so much typing on the keyboard, it makes sense to get a notebook with the best keys. That rules out most cheap notebooks and any with chiclet keyboards, consider I was using this at work before. ThinkPad keyboard rocks, even better than the D630 I had before, which I thought was pretty good already.

And the UltraNav. Wow. Now I remember why I never bothered to use that blue sticky thing on my old Dell Latitude, because it sucks. Lenovo’s implementation is so much better (consider they actually popularised it). At the same time I found the trackpad not as responsive as my old Dell, which forces me to use the trackpoint more.

So far so good. This will be my main computer for the next 3 years, and hopefully it lasts.

Yes, the ASUS Eee PC 701 with 4GB SSD and 512MB RAM, for a bit over 400 bucks second hand. First impressions:

• Small. Not tiny, but very small. The above picture shows its size comparing to my Dell Latitude D630.
• Booting up and shutting down is fast.
• Very responsive. You don’t feel like its a 677Mhz Celeron.
• Connected to my Wi-Fi at home in less than 2 minutes.
• Keyboard is probably its weakest link. It can be difficult to type on.

Actually it reminds me a lot of my old Psion 5mx — little cute device that is a full functional computer. In fact it actually has a bigger keyboard than the old 5mx so I’ll hopefully be able to touch-type on it after some practise.

Unfortunately I planned to work on my talk for this Saturday tonight so I can’t spend too much time on it. A better review next time.

MacBook Air is ultrathin, ultraportable, and ultra unlike anything else. But you don’t lose inches and pounds overnight. It’s the result of rethinking conventions. Of multiple wireless innovations. And of breakthrough design. With MacBook Air, mobile computng suddenly has a new standard.

Thanks for reminding me that I can’t lose inches and pounds overnight — gotta get back to my exercise plan. However, being “ultraportable” is exactly what Apple is trying to sell MacBook Air at. On the scale it weights 1.36kg, which is almost a whole kilo lighter than its fat brethren MacBook the unportable (2.27kg). At 0.4-1.94cm thin, you will have to buy those notebook bags with 5cm of padding so you won’t accidentally snap it in half when you throw it around.

Its CPU is a tad slower than MacBook at 1.6/1.8GHz. There is no optical drive included, i.e. at cost extra. The hard disk is either a small’ish 1.8″ 80GB or 64GB solid state drive (as an AUD$1,409 upgrade!), battery is not self-serviceable, and RAM is soldered on… It is the price you have to pay when it is designed for the niche market of ultraportable, where rivals like Sony Vaio and Toshiba Portege were used to charge their customers at a premium.

Will I buy one? No way. Starting at AUD$2,499 it is almost a whole big one more expensive than equally equipped MacBook. I know I am getting old but 1 extra kilogram is not a biggie to me. Apple knows how to design a beautiful package, preaching a message not why people will need one, but why you would want one. Being a cold hearted pragmatic, unfortunately Stevie’s distortion field has pretty weak effect on me. That’s probably why I still have not had an iPod.

But let me tell you what other ultraportable notebook has taken my fancy — Asus Eee PC. It is small. It is light. It sold like a hotcake — because it is cheap. You can buy a brand new one from OfficeWorks for $488, or less if you shop hard on eBay. It weights only 0.92kg so you probably won’t even feel it when you throw one into your bag.

Obviously there are some issues, and the Asus’ $488 Eee PC is probably not a good comparison with Apple’s $2,499 MacBook Air.

• 900MHz Celeron underclocked to 667MHz. Don’t expect a speed demon here.
• 4GB SSD is probably not even enough for your photo collection.
• 7″ LCD at an awkward resolution of 800×480 is not good even watching DVDs.
• 21-35mm thickness. Yes it is thick.

• It runs Linux.
• You need to be a midget to type on it.

But at less than $500, it has everything a person need to get work done, i.e. press Ctrl-Alt-T to bring up an Xterm — what else do you need to get work done? :) It has Wifi to access Internet, has a ethernet adapter (which MacBook Air lacks), has a card reader, runs OpenOffice.org, runs Firefox, etc. With the current climate, maybe an Eee PC would be a more prudent decision for ultraportable?

Which ultraportable would you get? Air or Eee?

Probably because it is so easily broken, that people actually want to buy a few spares just in case.

You see, my everyday computer is a Dell Latitude D600, which I got from work 2 and half years ago. I do almost everything on it, and I reckon it is always doing something 12-15 hours a day, 6-7 days a week. It has quite a significant wear and tear with scratches everywhere. Worst of all, it has broken hinges.

A few months ago hinge on the right broke. It snapped and broke into half. Now I know why laptops have two hinges — when one is dead, the other one can continue to hold the LCD monitor to up-right position.

Unless the other one snapped as well.

Two weeks ago I was typing something on my laptop, and there went another “SNAP!” the left hinge broke as well! It sucks to have both hinges broken, because the LCD screen can no longer stand by itself. It either falls flat to the back and knocks something over, or falls to the front, closes the computer, and puts the whole thing into hibernation. I have to use a book-block to hold the monitor while I am typing.

No good. Especially when it is already out of warranty.

However when I googled around, broken hinges on Dell Latitude D6xx models are actually pretty common. Moreover, it is also trivial to find replacement hinges on eBay. So instead of throwing out this perfectly fine laptop, I went and ordered a pair of hinges for USD$22 delivered. It came today, so I got a chance to put them on tonight.

Getting hinges replaced is pretty trivial — basically just open up the cover of Latitude’s LCD monitor, take the old hinges out, and put the new ones back in. A few screws need to be unscrewed/screw back in along the process.

Now it is back to life again with the new hinges, so LCD screen no longer requires external support.

It is probably not the state of the art. It was a retired Compaq Presario at work, added in a few components I’ve found under my desk, so the total cost is almost $0. Here is the spec:

• Intel Celeron 400Mhz with 66Mhz FSB
• 160Mb PC100 SD-RAM
• 13Gb Seagate Barracuda
• Slimline CD-ROM with unknown speed
• 1.44Mb floppy drive
• S3 Virge 1Mb AGP video card
• Creative SoundBlaster 64 PCI

Operating system? Xubuntu 7.04 Feisty Fawn desktop edition. It runs Xorg, Xfce and Mozilla Firefox. Pretty much works “out of box”. With Macromedia Flash Player for Firefox installed, it is just fast enough for Anna to play Keyboard-o-rama (currently Anna’s favourite Sesame Street game).

Looking at how useful this old computer (400Mhz Celeron is around 7-8 years old) is to a little kid, especially when you compare to what Michael Dell is using, I wonder how wasteful we have been throwing out relatively-new PCs every 3-4 years.

World OLPC be deployed to Australia? I think not — unless we are willing to pay 2x to 3x the price to cover the cost of development and donate the rest so the kids in developing country who really cannot afford it can have one.

Update: Glenn linked to this Australian IT article saying NT government is also planning trailing in schools. They have officially declared that they are a developing country that needs financial assistance to give students computers? In another news, Ars Technica reported that OLPC has no consumer version planned, via Slashdot.

Wasn’t a good start yesterday morning.

(mental note to myself — do not choose a FS by its speed and ability to work over large number of small files. Next time choose a file system with large number of recovery utilities.)

And the old server running at home just makes recovering suck a pain, especially if you are running Gentoo. 450Mhz might be bleeding edge 6 years ago, but watching things compiling today is enough to make my nose bleed.

So for a while I was contemplating whether I should upgrade that oldie at home. Getting a cheap Sempron, a budget socket 754 motherboard that has got everything integrated, a single stick of 1Gb DDR RAM — that would cost around $350. That might last me another 5 years before I need to upgrade to 10Ghz quad core box in order to compile Linux kernel efficiently in 2011.

Then got the news that SM is going back to HK for good, and she dropped her old Dell Dimension 8200 to our place — just in time to replace our old server! It has a 2.0Ghz Pentium IV, runs very quite, and very easy to open up the case. Not speed demon, but at least this 4 year old box is 400% faster than my 6 year old P3 450Mhz.

But it has got a problem. Memory. Only 384Mb and all 4 slots are occupied. It might not be enough as an app server. Moreover, it was the first Pentium IV’s that uses 850 chipset and RDRAM! Yes, that expensive Rambus thingy that Intel eventually admited their mistake and dropped them quietly in favour of DDR RAMs.

Looking at eBay, a second hand 1Gb combo costs around $300. Ouch. Even more expensive when you search on staticICE. Hmmm.

So. New hardware? Or Rambus?