thinkpad – Made by Mikal

Alan Cox’s IBM ThinkPad explodes

This burning laptop thing is starting to get old.

Thinkpad x41 tablet PCMCIA IO

Random observation for the day: when I empty the compact flash card from my camera using the PCMCIA slot on my x41, the whole machine turns into a pumpkin… Even though the disk is basically idle, the entire machine stops responding to anything. It’s quite annoying.

New laptop

The dead ThinkPad R51 has been replaced by a new ThinkPad X41, which accidentally turned out to be a tablet PC without me really intending it to be. It’s a nice looking machine, and the perfect combination of size and weight (small and light). I think we’re going to be very good friends.

Ubuntu Breezy installed just fine on the machine, although I haven’t bothered to get everything working yet. I’ll report back if I have any interesting problems getting stuff going.

ThinkPads return to bricks and mortar retail in the US

I didn’t realize they’d ever left stores, but now you can get ThinkPads at bricks and mortar stores in the US. Given my impending travel, come to pappa…

[icbm: home]

r51 update

Well, at least the disc from the R51 would boot in the X21 that I had
lying around… The only thing I needed to do to make all of that work was
to reconfigure x.org to work with the different video card and ensure that
I had the right module for the network card loaded. Now I can get back to
the book…

Should I buy a new battery for the X21 (the current one is garbage)? Or
should I just get a new laptop real soon now? These and other questions
will be explored soon…

So, that was me tempting fate apparently

So, apparently I tempted fate, just as the CVS commit of the work on the final chapter of the book finished, and I got around to writing the blog post about the machine, it locked up again. What happens is that the screen goes blank (except for some random red and blue dashes this time), and the power and disc lights stay on. The machine doesn’t respond to any input.

I’m wondering if it’s temperature related, as the machine worked ok until I went out into the sun to do some work. The machine is out of warranty, and having played around with the memory, and knowing that the disc isn’t the problem that really leaves the logic board, which probably means it’s not worth repairing.

I’ve got an older ThinkPad without a working battery that I can use for now, but I guess it’s time to start thinking about a new machine. I really want to get the book out of the way before getting distracted on that kind of stuff though.

Pain with the ThinkPad

I have no problems with my various ThinkPads — in fact I love them greatly. They’re by far the most reliable and well built laptops I have ever owned. That didn’t stop my R51 from stopping working on Saturday. I woke up in the morning having had a bad night with Matt who has an ear infection. Anyways, the machine was locked up when I finally got out of bed, which has like the third time in the last couple of days. Repeated attempts to reboot the machine resulted in a laptop which wouldn’t power up at all (apart from the disk and power lights turning on).

To cut a long story short, disassembly and a good solid clean with aerosol freeze spray (the only non-conductive aerosol I could find) seems to have fixed the problem. Odd.

I’ll keep you posed on if it keeps working…