New laptop

I bought a new laptop. I wanted something quite small, but still very powerful. Something with “inner bigness”, if you will. I wanted it small so I could easily use it on the train, possibly as a replacement for my PSP for watching movies and doing computer-based training.

Specifically, I wanted a decent laptop with a 12” screen, and ideally I wanted to spend less than $1000 CDN before taxes. Unfortunately, this is not really possible – all the decent laptops with 12” screens are priced starting at $1500, and that’s generally a minimum configuration.

I considered an Apple Macbook, and might have considered more if I’d waited until after the recent price drop, but they’re still $1100 for a minimal configuration – to get what I’d consider decent I’d still be looking at $1500.

A couple of months ago I bought a used/off-lease Dell GX270 small form-factor desktop machine from cdnsys.com, who also have used laptops. So I went back to them and started perusing laptops.

The two laptops matching my requirements that they had a lot of stock on were the Lenovo Thinkpad T60 and the Lenovo 3000 v100. The T60 is pitched as more a “enterprise machine”, being in the Thinkpad line, and the 3000 is more the SOHO product. For my purposes, though, the V100 looked perfect.

So I bought one. I placed the order last Thursday, and it arrived on Tuesday. The price was about $1175 plus tax, so a little more than I had intended, but it also had significantly higher specifications than I was originally looking for, so it balanced out.

The specs of the machine:

• Core 2 Duo processor at 2Ghz (T7200)
• 2Gb RAM
• 120Gb 5400RPM SATA drive
• 802.11n wireless and Bluetooth
• Fingerprint reader and camera
• 12.1” high-gloss screen (like the Macbook)
• Windows XP Pro installed (original Lenovo install)

More posts later on getting Linux running on it…