IBM is great
Posted by Yanthor on 2004-06-28 12:25:39
World-readable
Of course, you and Kiesa are probably aware of my preference for IBM laptops. Let me explain. I think quality is one of the most important qualities to have in a laptop. I can't upgrade it and replace a bad laptop part easily the way I can with a desktop. IBM offers a 3 year warranty on most of their laptops (other than the cheapest line). From the limited shopping I did among other manufacturers, I remember few of their models coming by default with a 3 year warranty.That base warranty basically means they don't expect much failure during those 3 years and I think that is a good thing. :-)
Also, I know that IBM is much more alternative operating system friendly than the other main brands. I was told by my company's purchasing guy who loves IBM that each of their models has a Linux support area. I haven't attempted to find the fabled site since her laptop only runs Windows XP and BeOS 5.0. I should point out that her laptop works really well in BeOS now. The video works great with a real driver not VESA, sound works, networking works great with a guy's beta driver.
I remember Kiesa liking Anya's laptop quite a bit. Anya's laptop is an IBM Notebook T40 Series (2379D6U). Here is a quick summary of its features:
- 1400x1050 screen
- 40 GB Hard Drive
- Radeon 9000 Mobility video card (so it has good gaming graphics acceleration for a laptop)
- video out
- 4.5 pounds including battery (titanium frame for lighter weight)
- built in wireless (Two invisible antennas built into the sides of the monitor. It often connects to Humblik's wireless network from the middle of our apartment.)
- relatively easy restore to Windows XP factory settings if Windows partition gets screwed up. (After I repartitioned the hard drive, this feature still works and restored painlessly onto a shrunk first partition.)
- 5 hour use if you aren't using the CD/DVDROM drive. A longer-life battery you can buy on ibm.com sounds like it might double that useability time to 10 hours. :-)
A memory upgrade to 512 MB, which I think is necessary for Windows XP and shipping from CDW came to about $2000. Yeah, it is more than the cheapest systems, but the reliability, alternative OS friendly, and great features are what sealed the deal for us. Maybe that model is also a little cheaper now.
Our people here have found the IBM people to be really nice to work with. We ordered ours through CDW because of a slight work discount, but you can also get a sizeable discount on ibm.com if you are a Discover card member and click into ibm.com through discovercard.com's preferred merchant area.
Whatever you do, don't buy a T30, we have had some problems with that model at work. It seems to be an exception. All the other models we have here at work are good, and we've had no problems with Anya's laptop, except that there has been a weird noise occaisionally that sounds like a fan, but I haven't heard it in a while. My coworker says that the T40 has most of the same pieces as the T30, and he thinks that since it is second generation that it has all the bugs fixed that cropped up in the T30. The T40 has a different core chipset and a titanium frame, but those items weren't where the problems were on the T30. Our problems with the T30 were mainly static vulnerabilities on the network card and RAM slot issues.
Old Phones are Better (2004-06-26 10:21:49)
- IBM is great (Yanthor at 2004-06-28 12:25:39)
- Dell is OK also (cg4l at 2004-06-29 18:17:41)
- OId Man Jaeger (bouncing at 2004-07-02 08:30:36)
