Keepin' the Old Truck Runnin'

Almost eight years ago I bought a cutting edge ultra-portable laptop -- the Lenovo X60s. It was, in fact, the same computer my billionaire boss was using. In Scotland, it is still my workhorse, driving an external monitor, recharging half my life via USB, etc. My $120 in upgrades from a year and a half ago is holding up quite well.

I was starting to get worried about it running hot all the time, so when I got here so I bought an external cooler, but the CPU fan is getting very rattly now, so I ordered a replacement on eBay and opened the thing up again. Turns out I had the wrong part, so I'll have to try again. It is certainly nice though to have a laptop that you can operate on without too much trouble. At this point I've been in and out of it enough that I have to remember the parts I've discarded along the way (fingerprint reader, modem wiring) or I get confused comparing mine to the how-to pictures on the internet. So far I've only lost one screw.

A big question though over the past decade or so has been "How much laptop is enough?" If you ask me, a 2006 Lenovo with an SSD and 3gigs is pretty much the sweet spot.

Unfortunately, I didn't test the Model M2 keyboard I brought with me (it is smaller than my regular M1), and it has bad capacitors. I imagine Jennifer doesn't miss my clacking keys in our flat here.

Not Buying a New Laptop

I'm typing this on my ThinkPad X60s, which I bought when it was the new top of the line ultraportable. I think I paid about $2,500 for it about six years ago. It has been slowing down lately, and failing in annoyingly peripheral ways. Power supply starting to short out, you can only buy third party replacement batteries that have probably been sitting on a shelf for four years, etc. So I've been hankering for some kind of replacement.

What I'd love is a little ARM netbook that runs Ubuntu perfectly for about 10 hours on a charge. That doesn't exist. I'd be happy with a cheap tablet that could run Ubuntu, but that doesn't exist either. I need to be able to run SchoolTool on the thing, not for any kind of serious development, but in case I need to demo it in a pinch with no internet access.

So I looked at the various low cost laptops. I don't want a chromebook, I want to run regular Ubuntu. I don't want to buy a laptop with a slow traditional disc drive. I found myself looking for a cheap laptop for which I could easily upgrade the memory and drive. I pretty quickly realized at that point I might as well just get more memory (I guess 1 gig just doesn't do it anymore) and a solid state drive for this thing, which will then probably still be faster than a new under $500 laptop.

So I put another $120 into this thing, and at this point I think I'll just buy another X series from Lenovo when it finally croaks for good, unless someone makes a great Ubuntu ARM laptop for under $500...

Ubuntu Netbook Edition

My laptop is a Lenovo X60s -- a 12" subcompact that four years ago was pretty l33t. It still works fine, and I'm hoping that by the time it croaks I'll be able to get the same performance and much better battery life from a netbook at about one tenth the Lenovo's original price.

Anyhow, when I upgraded to the new Ubuntu Lucid release I switched to the Netbook Edition. I'm happy with the switch, since I've taken to spending most of my time with Chrome taking up the whole screen anyhow, and I'm looking forward to the planned changes going forward for Maverick. I'm becoming extremely intolerant of interfaces that waste vertical space in small screens for an endless stack of bars and panels.

Also, if you want to make a bootable usb stick for installation, you want to use usb-creator on Ubuntu. The download site points you to usb-imagewriter which didn't actually create anything bootable for me.