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blog business laptop music personal shopping technology

What is it that I want

While moving tons of my ex-IT stuff from old apartment to new (and losing some ISA network cards on the way) I realized what is it that I ultimately need while most of my stuff is unavailable (like when I am moving, traveling, vacationing and so on). So think of this as of unofficial wish list:

  • PDA/cell phone. Not a smartphone, it’s a poor excuse at being a decent organizer having a screen size of a matchbox and no keyboard. Something like an iPhone, but runs Windows Mobile and doesn’t look like a proletariat’s weapon of choice. With hundreds of software titles already available, seamless sync with Outlook and (again!) large screen size, so I can actually read documents/books/emails without hurting my eyes, watch stand-up shows or documentaries in the gym or on the road such device would win me over any fancy useless gadget. Oh, and add regular headphones jack (instead of smaller non-compatible one) and no-cradle sync/recharge cable for easy packing to that.
  • Small cheap laptop. I currently own IBM/Lenovo T60p, T42 and T40p. None of them qualifies neither as cheap nor as small. Something with screen size of 10 – 12 inches (1024×768), solid-state disk and price tag below $600 – $700 with decent battery life (at least 4 – 5 hours) should suffice. Every time some teenager or poor old lady entering backwards into subway car smashes into my backpack with my $3000 T60p with two hard drives in it, or my car hits the bump on the road, or airport security kicks a basket with my laptop out of scanner – I think of solid-state disks and cheap (read – replaceable without busting my budget) laptop.
  • Personal Media Player with removable storage. It’s amazing to see all those gazillion-gigabyte iPods, Zens, Zunes, iRivers and other misspelled words to try to host all owner’s music collection in a single place to make it easier to loose all in one take. I owned Creative Zen 20GB – thrown away as their web site is total mess and no drivers I downloaded would work with my player after attempt to hook it up to a new PC; had Toshiba Gigabeat 30GB – stolen, but I didn’t like it anyway – their sync software tries to act as DRM-police and extremely slow, player just won’t play directly uploaded mp3 files, sync via cradle didn’t work as expected plus none of my girlfriends in the passenger seat could figure out how to navigate “that cross thingy”. So all I want for now is a media player that will accept SD or Flash (or both) cards of any denomination and just play whatever is on them. With simple buttons like Play, Stop, Skip, Rewind not arranged in a puzzle or some other cryptic combination.

Re-read all of the above. Why do I need office, again?

Categories
annoyances laptop technology

Old case, new case

Just called Lenovo for the status of my old laptop repair. So far they only got the replacement fan yesterday and fixed the whole unit today and shipped it today as well. In the meantime, they moved to new software so now reps look up orders in two versions of support software, giving wrong trouble-ticket numbers and messing up other stuff.

Good news – I’m putting Vista and Office 2007 Beta2 on my old laptop tomorrow.

Bad news – need to sell the old laptop ASAP.

Categories
laptop technology

New IBM/Lenovo T60p

Finally my brand new toy has arrived and I am spending enormous amount of time on moving stuff from two old 60GB hard drives to one new shiny 100GB drive. So far the system looks much better with 1600×1200 native screen resolution and IntelĀ® Core Duo processor T2700 (2.33GHz) plus 2GB of RAM.

By the way, speaking of RAM. Laptop refused to hibernate, giving me a “Insufficient System Resources Exist to Complete the API” error. Being a geek myself I immediately (as time permitted, ofcourse) googled the problem. One of the first results was this post that answered my question quickly and easily. It turned out that due to large amount of RAM installed (2GB) Windows kernel was unable to allocate enough resources to hibernate. Read it and weep.

After patching system seem to hibernate normally. 3:20am, I can go to hibernate myself for four hours. Finally.