Word: thinkpads
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Installing Linux was not exactly a walk through hell, but there was no way I could have done it without help--another reason to pay for something you can get free. After making absolutely no headway on my garden-variety IBM ThinkPad, I finally called "Thor," a guy in Red Hat's support squad. He checked around and then informed me that I was out of luck. My external CD drive was incompatible with the Red Hat distribution. "Laptops can be a nightmare," he confessed. Bowed, but not broken, I borrowed a desktop PC from the bowels of Time...
When I got my svelte, 4-lb. IBM Thinkpad last year, it made my old Mac PowerBook look obese. At 7 lbs., the Mac was a laptop in the same way that a bull mastiff is a lapdog. You need a pretty big lap. But my ThinkPad was so small and powerful, I figured I'd take it everywhere. On the train, Mr. Productivity would write his columns, answer his e-mail and even "test" a game...
...what about people who aren't so blessed as to work for the best darn company in the world? Laptops constitute the fastest-growing sector of the computer market, and last year Big Blue undertook the most extensive consumer-research campaign in ThinkPad's six-year history to try to figure out who's buying them. It discovered a new class of information worker: mobile folks who buy their own gear. These consumers work at small start-ups. They're college students. They're even people who like to telecommute, but from the sofa rather than the home office. Some...
...least, that's how it seems, based on how IBM's new ThinkPad i Series turned out. The company's first consumer-targeted notebooks, due out next month, are priced at $1,499, $1,999 and $2,499. All have active-matrix color screens, 56K modems and 20X CD-ROM drives. And inch-wide Altec-Lansing stereo speakers...
Slightly bigger screens, more capacious hard drives and extra RAM account for the price difference between models. The top of the i line, the ThinkPad 1720, is the only one powered by a Pentium II chip rather than the more declasse Pentium I. I spent last week getting to know the mid-priced model, the ThinkPad...