THINKPAD T61P GOOD!  WINDOWS VISTA BAD!
(Posted 2008-04-15 12:29:34 by Ray Lopez)

I recently bought myself a lovely Thinkpad T61p laptop.  As an ex-IBMer, I
came to love the rock solid design of the Thinkpads they issued us, and
every laptop I've bought myself has been a Thinkpad.



I am happy to report that the T61p, now made by Lenovo, of course, is no
exception.  I love this thing.  My particular machine has the Core2 Duo
processors, a beautiful wide screen driven by an Nvidia graphics card, 3 GB
of RAM, DVD burner, and 200 GB of hard disk space.  The everything about
this machine is right on the mark and nearly perfect, except for the fact
that my AT&T wireless network card doesn't pop out of the PC Card slot when
I punch the ejection button.  Other than that very minor detail, I can
highly recommend the T61p to anyone looking for a powerful but portable
workstation.



The Thinkpad came preloaded with Windows Vista Ultimate.  I had read all of
the negative press about Vista, and had some experience dealing with it on
relative's laptops.  I almost went ahead and bought XP instead, but I
figured I may as well give Vista a fair shot.  This is a decision I now
regret somewhat.  



I say "somewhat" only because I don't use Vista in my day to day work.  I
purchased another hard drive for my T61p and use it for running the best
Linux distro ever, Slackware.  Even so, I spent quite a bit of time setting
up the only two apps I need which are currently impossible (at least for
me) to run in Linux: iTunes and the software for my Sony eReader.  



I don't know what was more annoying, the extreme SLOOOOOOOOWNESS of the
bloated Vista OS, or the constant permission boxes that pop up every time
you need to do most anything.  One of the things that was wonderful about
XP was the rapid boot up time, and that seems to have been forgotten by the
builders of Vista.  There's a lot of pretty eye candy with the Aero
interface, but that is overwhelmed by the slowness of the system in general
and the overly complex security restrictions.



Vista became somewhat more useable when I went back to the "Windows
Classic" look and turned off the annoying "need permission to continue"
popups by turning off "User Account Control".  



Even so, that didn't help yet another issue I had with Vista:  It would not
talk to my networked printer at home!  No matter what I did, the drivers in
Vista simply would not allow it to talk to my printer.  



As I said, I don't use Vista every day.  On I second hard drive, I
installed Slackware Linux and have been doing very well with it so far.  I
am running the latest stable kernel (2.6.24.4), and pretty much everything
works well.  I went ahead and used the proprietary Nvidia driver for my
video card, and it works perfectly with X.  I also had to download and
install the Atheros wireless chip driver from madwifi.org to get the
wireless card working.  After spending some time custom configuring my
kernel, I installed it, the madwifi driver, and the Nvidia driver, and am
happy to report that everything works well.  The only thing I have not had
time to figure out yet is how to activate the Thinkpad volume control keys
on the keyboard.  



Overally, I give the Thinkpad T61p an "A+" for design, function and looks. 
I give Windows Vista a "D+".  I truly hope that Microsoft decides to ditch
this abomination, as they did with Windows ME.  


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