The other day, the postman brought a parcel containing a brand new Lenovo Thinkpad X60. I had not ordered it, nor was there a letter accompanying it, telling me of its purpose. I signed for it, checked it out a bit, but did not install anything on it yet. It’s not mine until someone tells me so.
My current reasoning for why such a parcel turned up in my mail (it’s neither Christmas nor my birthday) dates back to a lengthy email exchange with Lenovo’s QA group around the turn of the year. I own an IBM Thinkpad X40, and even though it’s the best notebook I’ve ever had, it seems to go through phases of serious ACPI problems, randomly freezing on anything ACPI-related. Together with the IBM/Lenovos on-site support, I replaced literally everything in the laptop twice: motherboard/CPU/graphics card/network card combo, bluetooth adapter, wifi card, keyboard, batteries, RAM, but the problems persisted. The only item I had not swapped was the display, which could well be the culprit — the ACPI events causing the freezes all seemed video-related.
But when the support crew refused to replace the display on the suspicion of a broken firmware, I decided to stop playing ping-pong and instead escalated my call into a complaint, asking for a total replacement of the laptop. My main argument was simple: it’s cheaper for them (and me) to just replace the laptop, than to send out the technician another X times, until the problems are fixed (for I was not going to give up).
I have not heard from them since, but the X60 in my mail seems like it could be related, and it’s an interesting response by Lenovo at that, catapulting the company again very high on my scale of favourite vendors. So far, however, I have not heard from them, and they certainly have both, my email address as well as my phone number.
So why this post? Well, I don’t really want an X60 to replace my X40, for numerous reasons:
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I cannot use my existing pair of long-life X40 batteries but am stuck with a single standard battery, giving me a battery runtime of about 2.5 hours, as opposed to the 8 hours I can get right now out of the pair of extended X40 batteries.
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The X60 has been found to have a shorter battery life than the X40 anyway.
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It has a Swiss-German keyboard with windows/Vista keys, and I cannot swap in the X40 keyboard because the connector is a different one.
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It’s heavier than my X40 by about 150g.
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It does not use the same power plug as the X40 (and all other IBM laptops), which is a disadvantage at the geek conferences I attend, where at least every second person has an IBM laptop and can thus lend me a power plug for a while. Also, the second X40 power adapter I bought, as well as the car power adapter, are thus of no use to me.
There are, of course, plenty of reasons I should swap:
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The X60 has a Centrino dual-core processor, which is more powerful and at the same time also more battery-friendly. Still, it runs shorter than the X40, and battery lifetime is more important to me than processor oomph.
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The X60 comes with a 80Gb SATA 2.5” drive and is thus much more capacious and extensible than my X40 with the 40Gb PATA 1.8” drive.
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The X60 has three USB plugs (although I will need two for the CD-RW drive I have, for which the X40 had a special power plug), and a Firewire port (which I don’t need).
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The X60 has a fingerprint reader, which supposedly works with Linux already.
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It has an Intel wireless chipset, which is undoubtedly superiour to the Atheros chipset in the X40. Of course, I could just exchange the Mini-PCI card.
Neither of these lists are exhaustive. All in all, I calculated that accepting the X60 and replacing all the X40’s accessories I need, I would have to spend somewhere between 500€ and 800€. However, the benefits of the X60 over the X40 do not warrant this kind of expense in my book. The ACPI problems are a pain, but they are intermittent, and most of the time I can use the notebook just fine. I should instead just make sure to always have my presentations on USB stick, and start looking out the window more on planes and trains, having completed my client work the day before departure, not putting it off for the way.
So what to do?
My current idea is to wait 28 days for Lenovo to make a move (such as requesting my X40 to be turned in), and then to put the X60 on Ebay, with the explicit note that I shall donate the entire revenue to a small Chinese charity organisation (to be selected up front; can anyone refer me to one?) — the idea here obviously being that the money should go to China due to Lenovo’s involvement. I guess this story would make a few news sites and consequently drive the price up.
I am also happy to hear other suggestions.
NP: Emerson, Lake & Palmer / Brain Salad Surgery
Update: one suggestion was to donate it to the
ibm-acpi folks, or to raise money to donate it to
them. It’s now also on my list.
Update: I am proceeding with the donation to China.
