Nice little Lenovo S10

Picked up an S10, dropped in a 1GB chip, swapped disk for a spare 7200RPM I had sitting around. No speed demon, but readable. usable, and I can ride bike to work with it (very light, very compact). I wish it had the InstantOn or Splashtop or whatever ...

T61 - nice!

I gave the new MacBook Pro to someone who'll use it better (one of the developers) and now I'm using the oldest MBP we have as my office machine, and an old Lenovo T61 as a development machine (running Fedora 10). Except for a slight problem with getting sleep mode to work on the T61, it's way the better machine - easy on the eyes (the black finish is non-glare, the screen is matte but very readable), it's comfortable on the hands, ... I like it! Enough so that I'm thinking about putting out a couple hundred bucks for a CPU upgrade.

Nothing's perfect - the T61 battery sticks out the back oddly, making me nervous about breaking it off with some of my legs-on-the-table postures ... and the screen could be 10% or 20% brighter for daylight environments. But so far, this is the best laptop I've used; when I replace my personal laptop (a Toshiba tablet) I'm going to see if I can afford another Lenovo.

Newer MBP - some better, some worse

Switched to the new solid-aluminum MBP. Case doesn't have the front gap, and the screen tilts back more - this is good. But screen is glossy, so I have to run brighter to drown out reflections and the result is shorter battery life - very not good.

The previous MBP had a DVI, so I could plug some monitors in directly, or use a simple VGA/DVI adapter with (for exapmple) our conference room projectors. Well, the new machine has a different connector for external monitors - a 'Mini DisplayPort' I think it's called. So I need adapters, to DVI for most monitors and to VGA for the projectors.

Oddly, the Mini DisplayPort-to-DVI adapter does *NOT* connect to the Apple DVI-to-VGA adapter we use with our projector to hook up to the MacBook Pros, so I'll need to remove the Apple DVI/VGA adapter, connect up a VGA-out adapter between my machine and the projector. This defeats the goal of the 'common hardware platform' theory, doesn't it?

And, to be even *more* annoying, the new Mini DisplayPort-to-DVI connection sucks. The external monitors done't wake up from common Mac 'sleep' - I have to close and open the lid to wake up the external monitor. Sometimes, the external monitors don't get sync, they are all static, and I have to unplug and re-plug the adapter. This all worked perfectly with the previous MacBook Pro; nice work, Apple.