Matt Graham wrote:
After a long battle with technology, Kurt Granroth wrote: [snip]The ThinkPad series has a great reputation but I'll have to say that I am grown to thoroughly detest the T42, T43, and T60 models. Based on those, I'm not so sure I can recommend the brand anymore...OK... what, exactly, was wrong with the T42? I've had a T42p for years now. The hardware has Just Worked except for the S-video out, which I've never tried. Suspend-to-RAM works fine as long as you're not running fglrx, DVD+-RW is fine, keyboard and Trackpoint are fine.
Well, of the three, the T42 was the best behaved. However, as you say, STR is incredibly flaky with flgrx and (in my experience) not all that stable with the community driver either. It's been a couple of years so my memory is getting fuzzy. I think the video out was somehow flaky too.
The T43 was a big step backwards. Yes, it had a bigger screen and faster CPU, but it failed big-time with the DVD drive. It uses some PATA to SATA bridge that doesn't support DMA at all. Which basically means that the drive is too slow to even *play* a DVD, much less write one. This one has a tendency to lock up during a resume from STR, especially when you are dealing with a docking station. The sound may or may not work, at any given time. That may be a software issue, though, since that's gotten much better with every new OS upgrade I've done.
The T60 is the single most unreliable laptop I've ever used with Linux. It locks up on resume several times a week. The sound is as off-and-on as the T43. Hrm... I'm honestly forgetting most of the rest. I definitely have cursed that one more than I've ever cursed any laptop in my life.
One thing you may not from my impressions is that it may not be the hardware at all. This could be 100% software problems. I know that co-workers with Windows XP on these same systems have had no problems. Honestly, I don't care. My choice of OS for my (non-Mac) laptops is Linux and if the support is crap, then I still get angry with the hardware. C'est la vie.
Kurt
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