I was so annoyed with my previous ACER laptop which did not completely lock the bios, but forced it to ‘noob-mode’. Making it impossible to turn on the cpu’s virtualisation features. Luckily somebody succeeded in modding the bios update image and flipping the ‘noob-mode’ bit in it so the laptop became actually usable. I don’t understand why these laptop makers seem to go out of their way to annoy the customer.
“I see you bought our new laptop. You know it has a screen attached? Cool eh? You’re just not allowed to turn it on!”
About the Thinkpads being sturdy: not so much. Typing this from a Thinkpad. Had it for 2 months and the fans start to vibrate already. Let it do any serious work and it starts thermal-throttling. It has a quad core (with HT) core i7 inside, but my old ACER with a dual core i5 is faster in heavy compile jobs, so the i7 is just there for bragging value. You can use it for all of 10 seconds before it starts throttling.
Honestly, they’ve always been a bit mixed. Going back more than 15 years to the IBM days, they had one model (380D) that really was sturdy. We still had one in a lab somewhere essentially as a console server until recently.
Then there was the successor model (390X?). I’m usually pretty gentle to laptops, but in the three years I had mine the plastic holding the screen in place essentially wore off. I’ve never seen anything like it. I had to use an external monitor while I waited for the replacement. We had a bunch of people who returned those to corporate IT in a paper bag in a similar state.
When my Commodore 64 died in the first semester of college, my parents got me a kaypro, which lasted me through 4 years of term papers and awful short stories, then promptly died the minute I tried to use it to write a word in grad school. For its time, it was a wonderful machine. And then in graduate school I got a DOS laptop that was something like 1/5th its size.
Once I programmed the thing, my stepdad used his to run inventory for a small video rental store (HFS, that makes me feel old).
And now that you’re gone, Berny (RIP you awesome human being), you should know that of the 20 times I checked out “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome”, probably 5 of those times I replaced the Max video with a more…uh…sultry movie from the “adults” section. Alright, actually it was more like 19 times.
Yeah, I was glad the local computer shop sold Kaypros rather than Osbornes because, By stacking their slightly less bulky floppies, the Kaypro made room for a much larger display. Not that the display size mattered all that much, since you were supposed to prop the case up on the lip of the keyboard, which put you really close to the screen, and you were working with 25 lines of 80 column green screen text. And I was young enough that focussing on close up text was no problem for me.
FYI for those too young to remember the era of CP/M: All of these luggable computers were limited by a rather fierce (for the era of full height 5.25" floppies) design constraint - they had to fit all their electronics, including display and keyboard, in a box that would fit under a standard airline seat.
I can’t speak to your individual situation. For that, you’ll have to consult your doctor. My RSI problems were in my metacarpal tendons, not in my ulnar nerve.
I started by sitting upright in my chair, instead of leaning back like I used to do. I also started keeping my wrists elevated as I typed instead of lazily resting them on the desk. This relieved pressure on my metacarpal tendons and after a few weeks, the pain went away.
Diskette storage was a big thing. My parents bought two expensive handsome handmade wooden diskette boxes. I have no idea what they are using them for now. Maybe Dvd-roms.
Before hard drives, instead of creating a folder to store things in, you put each project or each logical group of files on its own diskette. So I had an “essays” disk for each academic year, and a “stories” disk. Add in the program disks and their backups (because every software manual drummed it into your head that you were to make a copy of the software and use the copy for day to day work, and never ever use the factory disk for anything except making backup copies) and you needed at least 10 diskettes, more if you had to keep track of a lot of files or had extra software beyond the BASIC and the word processor (wordstar) and spreadsheet (calcstar or some such) that came bundled with the machine. But it was never a big deal to me to toss my plastic diskette box in my backpack when I wanted to take the Kaypro with me, so I’m not so sure diskette storage was all that great a trade off for the Osborne’s teeny screen.
Yeah, this is the sort of thing that has driven me away from doing more than casual experimentation with Linux. And why I am glad that my needs for computing horsepower are modest, because it’s possible to get used Macs fairly cheap if you monitor your ebay searches and are patient.
Three possibilities that occur to me for determining if a particular model of used laptop is going to have all the needed Linux drivers, without spending extra money on a preinstalled one. First, there is a lively forum community devoted to Thinkpads, and they have a Linux subforum.
Second, http://www.thinkwiki.org has detailed info on every model of thinkpad ever, and there may be articles there about Linux support for the model you are interested in.
Third, If linux has some kind of centralized UI for seeing the machine’s hardware and seeing what components lack drivers (note my vast Linux experience here) you could make a live USB stick, use it to boot the machine you are thinking of buying in the store, and see what drivers are missing.
Does anybody remember the really small tapes?
Remember working at a machine, before the kaypro, more keyboard than screen, it made place also for the tape above it. The screen was very wide, keyboard wide, but just a couple of cm high. Can’t remember the name of it.
And why not Mac, if you’re interested in Linux as well?
I do wish people would take these Micro$oft articles at more than face value. There’s plenty annoying about some of their practices, and focusing on the more conspiratorial distracts from other issues of usability.
But the diskette storage is taking up vertical room, not horizontal. Getting rid of it wouldn’t have made any more room for the screen, as the drives would still be the same width.
The drives could have been turned 90 degrees. I expect they weren’t because the small CRT size was the size they wanted it to be for engineering reasons, so no need for more room for it.
Yes. The BIOS forces the Intel SATA controller into RAID mode for better SSD power management. I have no idea why this is necessary, maybe the AHCI standard isn’t good enough?
Intel has not provided drivers to the Linux community to support RAID mode. So it’s technically Intel saying you can’t run Linux on it, not Lenovo or Microsoft.
All the BIOS really does is change the PCI device IDs, so making the Linux kernel recognize the SATA controller in RAID mode should be a simple change.
