February 16, 2008 – 3:16 pm
It has been one week now since the beginning of my experiment with the new laptops.
So far, so good. Very good actually. Here are some observations:
X61
Gutsy Gibbon works just fine on this thing. In terms of the “gotta haves” the
following work out of the box:
- suspend
- hibernate
- wireless
The X61 is noticeably lighter than the m1330 and I definitely prefer the
thinkpad keyboards (and trackpoint) to any other laptop setup I’ve tried.
Hibernation takes about 30 seconds to go down, and another 30 to resume and
wireless seems to recover nicely. These times are on par with what is needed
for booting, but a regular shut down is much quicker. I can’t see me using
hibernation too often day to day, but it certainly would be the ticket on a
plane when I need to stop working half way through something complex and I
would not want to have to start everything over again from scratch. Picking up
where I left off would be nice.
Suspend works much more quickly than hibernate, but the trade-off is you are
still using a little juice. Haven’t had a chance to see what the drain
actually is during sleep. The wireless connection comes back on nicely upon
resuming. Having suspend working is pretty critical for the way I use laptops
so I’m pleased with the X61/Ubuntu setup in this regard.
Another key feature I need in a laptop is the ability to work smoothly with an
lcd projector for presentations at conferences and for lectures. My previous
experiences with the X40 were never quite fully successful. With the X61
it appears that plugging it into a running projector and toggling the F7 key
does nothing. However, if I reboot the X61 with the vga connection intact,
then the LCD image is mirrored out to the projector. And, unlike the case for
the X40, the image is not blurred. I would say this is an improvement over the
last thinkpad. Having the ability to plug in and go without a reboot would be
nice, but this is at least workable.
I remember reading somewhere that another possible fix is to restart the
Xserver while the vga connection is in place ala CTRL-ALT-Backspace but
I’ve yet to try this out.
Dell XPS M1330
I’ve not used the M1330 as much this week so I haven’t really kicked the tires
too extensively, and look forward to doing so this week.
The screen on this thing is just gorgeous. It is the first glossy screen
laptop I’ve had, but I find myself quite liking the look. There doesn’t seem
to be much in the way of glare, although I’ve only used it indoors thus far.
The one small problem I encountered with the M1330 had to do with a wireless
connection and the authentication scheme used at work. There is a web based
authorization form that you need to access in order to use the wireless points
on my campus. For some reason, I’m not able to get the authorization form to
load in firefox, despite network manager showing me that I’m getting an IP
through dhcp. This is weird as it worked fine for the X61 and the E3 (below).
I’ll have to check on it next week some more.
Eee Pc
Took the smallest member of the family into work one day. On the way in I used
it while waiting on the trolley, then again on the trolley and actually got
some work done. Once I got to work the connection/authentication dance went
just fine and I was browsing in no time. Lot’s of coworkers commented about
how little and “cute” the thing is. I would have to agree.
The keyboard is definitely smaller and takes some getting used to, but I am
coming around to finding it workable.
At home, the E3pc is really nice for light surfing from a favorite chair/couch and I even managed to watch a movie on it (ripped to a usb keydrive). Could be the ticket for in-flight entertainment.
I also started modifying things over the default setup. I opted for the advanced view which is basically an older version of KDE. I’m also tempted to play around with different distros on different sd cards but haven’t had the time just yet.
Thus far I’m really liking the E3. It will be a keeper.
Posted in Hardware, eeepc, m1330n, x61 | No Comments »
