The post-vacation email deluge, I didn’t like, but could deal with. Coupled with an emergency transition to a new (old) laptop and the apparent failure of the hard drive I’d planned to use to facilitate that transition (also containing all of my music), and things have been a little chaotic the past two days. Hence, the lack of updates.
First, there’s the new laptop situation. Back on June 6th, I ordered a brand new X61s Thinkpad to replace the X60s loaner I had to return to them. For a variety of reasons, that never arrived. Under normal circumstances, this would be a bad thing. In this case, however, it proved beneficial because it gave me another month and a half to evaluate the laptop landscape, to get a better feel for the advancements of technologies like LED backlit screens and Solid State Drives (SSDs). It’s also worth noting that the Lenovo folks went out of their way to keep me a happy customer, in spite of the unfortunate delay situation. Goes a long way towards ensuring that I’ll get another Thinkpad – or recommend one – at some point in future.
Anyhow, the additional pondering led me to cancel my order for the X61s on Monday. It’s a fine machine in most respects, but given the rate at which display technologies are advancing, I couldn’t justify relegating myself to yet another 1024×768 display for the expected life of the machine (~2 years or so). Instead, I’m going to wait a few months to see what the reactions are like to the Dell XPS M1330, whether the stunning (if garish) Intel Metro design ever finds an OEM, or – ideally – if Lenovo can add an X-series model with a higher resolution, backlit screen to its product roadmap. Other suggestions are welcome, incidentally – I’ve looked at Asus, Samsungs, Toshibas and all manner of other laptops in the past week.
Although there’d be no new laptop this week, as expected, I was still going to need one at UbuntuLive and OSCON coming up, so what to do? Originally, I just planned to delay my return of Lenovo’s X60s one more week and bring that. Unfortunately, Sunday killed those plans. First, I woke up and powered on the machine to discover that some pixels had apparently passed away in the night, leaving me with two odd stripes running down the front of my LCD. That, I could have dealt with. Later, the Thinkpad DC power adapter destroyed the second – and last – functioning battery I had for the machine. That, I can’t, as it means that as soon as the machine is unplugged it powers off.
Which meant Plan B: dusting off the antiquated (and non-dual core) X40 I’d left behind when I got the X60s. With the Linux partition corrupted and the Windows acting wonky, I just blew the whole thing away with a fresh install of the Beta Ubuntu release, Gutsy Gibbon. Apart from a few niggling issues here and there, everything went fine and I’m writing this on that machine right now. That’s the good news.
The bad news is that the external hard drive I’d planned to use to stage the data to be migrated from the old machine to the new also chose to die last night – prognosis for recovery uncertain.
To net that down, then, we’ve had one LCD pixel failure, two destroyed batteries, one dead external hard drive, and one partial desktop migration. Oh, and the boat engine threw an overheat alarm yesterday. Good times, good times.
So anyway, that’s where I’ve been. More to come later. This time, with less bitching.
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