My first impressions of the Thinkpad T61p Wide screen
I dearly love my Thinkpad X60. It is light, it is quick, it has a biometric reader, and it is mine (not my employer’s). However, it has one really big drawback - it has only a 1024×768 screen. My official work computer is a well used Thinkpad T40. The “company” announced I was allotted a “refresh” - yippee ! I immediately asked for a Thinkpad X300. Unfortunately, the company has a short list of approved laptops with fixed configurations. I was not overly thrilled with their first recommendation. So, I thought, “if I can’t has a crisp light weight laptop, I’ll ask for the fastest, biggest, monster I could get. Hence, my new “desktop” is a 15.4″ wide screen Thinkpad T61p with 2GB of RAM and space for 2GB more plus a lightning Core Duo at 2.4GHz. I lost my light weight travel companion (gaining a bit over 2lbs to the travel weight) and the ease of a biometric reader (an option for the Thinkpad but not on the approved list by the company). The biggest different is the nearly 3x screen real estate provided by the 1920×1200 display !
I brought along my favorite tools - Synergy, Emacs, GIMP, Thunderbird (my blogging client thanks to Postie), XP-Themes, StandaloneStacks (I really can’t imagine working without this little gem), plus my usual work tools.
It’s sad that Ubuntu doesn’t get to grace this new machine. I can only imagine what it could do with 256Mb of video RAM and all that horsepower. But, as I blogged a while back, I have had to abandon Linux for Windows to be compatible with my upper management. I will admit, if my workload drops even a little, this new machine could go “dual boot” pretty quickly <grin>
