Work replaced the laptop I use on Monday. I had an IBM ThinkPad T43 for about 3.5 years. I wore its keyboard down, its back video lamp was starting to blank-out at various times, and its fan finally ground to a halt, making boot-ups impossible. As powerful as the T43 specs were, the replacement in T400 seemed judicious enough to me, given that it cost less than $900 (without an OS license, naturally, as I use Red Hat Linux).
To my surprise, this T400 is a real gem to work with, and I have found very little to gripe about. The gripes first: the LCD screen is configured as a “widescreen” within the same physical dimensions as the T43′s regular 4:3 aspect ratio, making the rather limited 1280×800 video mode much different to work with. The battery is a bit heavier and projects out the backside and angled upwards, making the overall form factor size a bit larger. The Intel graphic driver is still considered beta, and will sometimes lock-up using OpenGL applications.
Fortunately, those gripes don’t affect its usefulness for me to do my work. The counter to those particular gripes are: it has easy to use external video ports to support higher resolutions and larger screens; the battery is MUCH more heavy-duty providing nearly 6-hours of life whereas the T43 struggled to make for 90-minutes — and its contoured weight makes for good ballast on the lap, and remains externally cooler to the touch even though it reports its internal thermal is operating at 122-degrees; and the Intel chipset runs marvelously without requiring any outside changes to the running Fedora 10 auto-detection and configuration.
Without a doubt, its faster dual-core processor @ 2.4ghz over the single-core 1.86ghz is noticeable. And it runs efficiently using the Linux cpuspeed service, stepping clock rates @ 800mhz – 1.6ghz – 2.4ghz to meet demand. Its thermal runs at 99-degrees with less than 1900 RPMs fan speed, so it feels cooler and quieter than the predecessor. I had it pegged @ 2.4 which took it to 120-degrees when I left a running browser on NBA.com for twenty-minutes, and it only took about two minutes to resume back to 99 without any discernible heat exhaust or fan noise — only the expected, faster battery drain from my negligence.
Hibernate mode works extremely fast, and allows me to dock/undock without complications, even though that method does not allow for hot recognition of the additional I/O ports. Suspend mode is better for that — but it is slower to invoke and resume — and works as advertised.
The I/O ports have been re-engineered to make better use of real estate, without losing ports. In fact, it gained a new front-side 1394-firewire port and an additional USB port on its right-side, making nice for human conveniences. And the casing has a convenient hardware kill switch to cutoff wireless and Bluetooth — which Linux was kind enough to detect and report that state. The port replicator adds even more USB ports, so I was able to finally get rid of the hanging USB hub from the last one.
Even though Fedora 10 runs very comfortably using only 256mb RAM, it came standard with 2gb of RAM, so I anticipate more robust virtual sessions, running Windows XP and the such. With all the extra capacities in cpu, storage, and memory, I can now consider running an adhoc Caché database server without fear of literally burning it out.
I had helped our CIO, John Halamka, to evaluate Linux on a laptop back in the summer of 2006. I recall its limitations then, and some viable comments given back mainly surrounding the choice of hardware used in his pilot. I am certain some of that still applies today, but I could not be more pleased with the out-of-the-box operation this laptop model and Fedora 10 is providing for me in 2009 — it’s going to be a good year.
