Dropped my Thinkpad X200 twice in a week and dropped it again...

[BucklingSpring]

I hear modern Italian cars are well made.

Last time I eard, FIAT standed for Failure in Automotive Technology.

[keyboardlover]

Hahaha...my parents said when they were younger they called them "Fix It Again Tonys"

[BucklingSpring]

Reliability is just a single parameter to define a good car.

In 2009 the CEO of an amercian company gave me a ride in his spanking new Ferrari' 599 GTO.
After he turned the first corner, the right side flashing signal jammed in the on position. No matter what, It kept flashing.

That was hilarious. So much for a $400000 car. LoL

I'll never forget the sound of this engine.
I'll never forget the persisting sound of the flasher either. tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac tic tac

[The Solutor]

Hahaha...my parents said when they were younger they called them "Fix It Again Tonys"

 
I'm not a fiat fanboy at all, but this jokes are just the expression of what a good car should be for an american v.s. an european.

American cars were used to be big and strong, hugely consuming, equipped with very low technology engines and with completely undamped suspensions.

From that point of view a fiat, was an alien piece of technology, and yes likely less durable than the average american car.

BTW time are completely changed the petrol cost, and environment matters, started to be  concerns also in the US, while fiat had various techology milestones like the common rail diesel engine, invented at the CRF (the fiat research center) which revolutionized the diesel engines,  or the new gasoline engines with the electronically variable valve timing which is again a world first.

[The Solutor]

After he turned the first corner, the right side flashing signal jammed in the on position. No matter what, It kept flashing.

 
Clearly modern objects with mechanical microswitches are not for you

[BucklingSpring]

Clearly modern objects with mechanical microswitches are not for you

I have no issues with the microswitches... It's the poor stabilizers that bugs me.

I give credit to the 599 GTO - It has the best stabilizers ever.


And the look is just... Jaw dropping perfect.

[keyboardlover]

612 Scaglietti is my personal fav.

[BucklingSpring]

612 Scaglietti is my personal fav.

Nice! My ultimate drooling car is the Aston Martin Vantage

[.XL]

The best Italian cars are the ones made by Germans

Ford has more respect than Fiat in EU - my cousin traded in his tuned Fiesta for an Alfa GT only to trade that piece of trash in for a Focus SVT. He had to take the GT to the shop 4 times in one year of owning it...he had the Fiesta for 3 years and it was only in the shop to get turbos/radiators/etc installed!

Plus, all of you little boys need to step your toy game up...




EDIT: All jokes aside - I'm sure the Thinkpad laptops are fantastic and most of them don't have flat chiclet keys. They're very well built and I would like to own one.

/thread

[BucklingSpring]

It's funny.   I am finding people at OCN and Deskthority.net manage to write down the number of nickels they use.

 All that preaching finally paid off... (Pun intended)

[BucklingSpring]

EDIT: All jokes aside - I'm sure the Thinkpad laptops are fantastic and most of them don't have flat chiclet keys. They're very well built and I would like to own one.

 IBM Thinkpad and Toshiba Tecra are the best business laptops.

[.XL]

IBM Thinkpad and Toshiba Tecra are the best business laptops.

I've never had a good experience with Toshiba - I had to replace 4 Toshiba drives on one of my old laptops in the span of about a year and a half! It was pretty terrible. Especially considering that the first Toshiba drive I bought was to replace the Samsung drive that came in the laptop, I cycled through a total of 4 Toshibas, before settling on the original Samsung...must be the made in the Philippines crap that just breaks way too easily

What about the Sony Z series? I think they've renamed that S now, right? I've heard a lot of great things about that line.
 

I like buying the cheap HP chinese junk instead of the expensive IBM/Lenovo chinese junk.  Especially with stuff that obsoletes in 2 years.

That really depends - if you HP dm1z has to be replaced every year because it gets outdated, and an 8gb Lenovo (for argument's sake) lasts 4 years - who is ahead? The first really nice laptop I bought is my current Macbook Pro, and it's lasted twice as long as either of my other laptops. I paid between 750 (first one) to 900 (second one) and they both died within 2 years (total for both). My Macbook is about to turn 3 - 1 year of life longer than my previous two laptops, and it came at the same price as those 2 laptops. Any laptop I would have bought in the last year is pure profit for me. Sometimes getting the best you can afford from the get go will save you money down the line...

[BucklingSpring]

I've never had a good experience with Toshiba - I had to replace 4 Toshiba drives on one of my old laptops in the span of about a year and a half! It was pretty terrible.

Are we talking Tosh Tecra here?
I agree with Satelite and Protegé - They suck.
My Tecras we bounced around for years, with a lot of travel, dropping and abuse. Never had one failing on me.

[BucklingSpring]

Who cares?  
If you are not using SSDs in a portable device you are doing something wrong.

 
Depends how much you are welling to pay for your portable device.
My Archos media player comes with a 500Gb drive... How much would that cost in SSD?
I have to admit I have a boner thinking of the battery life of such a SSD beast as opposed to my power hungry HD.

[BucklingSpring]

I just picked up a 2TB Spinpoint drive from Newegg for $70 ($10 off) including free shipping for my HTPC.

Storage is cheap.

But since it's for my wife's Oprah shows I don't really care much about reliability.

Good because Samsung drives will give you exactly what you paid for.
To my point... Big Fast SSDs are still crazy expensive.

Good old spinning pizzas are becoming dirt cheap.
I like the WD's with 5 years warranty.
Green for enclosures and HTPC (keep em cool)
Black for performance

[ricercar]

RipOmeter numbers?

Hey ripster, my Apple Adjustable ripOmeter scores 70 (or 14, depending on how the count is recognized). Is this number conformed anywhere else? This seems high, even for an ALPS switch.

[The Solutor]

Lesseee - the math is more like the HP NotBook is 1/3rd the price and lasts 80% as long....

 
It's funny to see your position flipped when you speak about notebook v.s. keyboards.

BTW I payed my X100e  580€ I used it for a year and I sold it for 650€. The $ weakness helped but the point is that a thinkpad retain its value for a long time and this has to be taken in account speaking about the price.

[BucklingSpring]

Once you get a SSD you won't care about hard drive comparisons any more.

I sure don't.

I paid way too much money to get a OCZ RevoDrive X2 in my box. It is very fast in optimal conditions but overall I was not that impressed.

[The Solutor]

I paid way too much money to get a OCZ RevoDrive X2 in my box. It is very fast in optimal conditions but overall I was not that impressed.

 
I have an intel 160 on my desktop and a *cheap* sandisk on the x200t and I'm more than impressed.

Both machines are booting in 14 seconds v.s. over a minute with mech hdd everything is superquick. Even firefox is not too far from opera when launched for the first time.

SDD are surely the biggest single step upgrade I saw in 20 years, well maybe the first 3d card versus a plain one was a comparable step.

[The Solutor]

Keyboards retain their value.  Laptops do not.

Show Image

 
Looks like the IBM and legacy products will retain their value.

Model M are not just keyboards, thinkpads are not just laptops.

[zmurf]

I have an intel 160 on my desktop and a *cheap* sandisk on the x200t and I'm more than impressed.

Both machines are booting in 14 seconds v.s. over a minute with mech hdd everything is superquick. Even firefox is not too far from opera when launched for the first time.

SDD are surely the biggest single step upgrade I saw in 20 years, well maybe the first 3d card versus a plain one was a comparable step.

I use CF cards as hard drive for all four of my Amigas and in my tmux/irssi server (Running OpenBSD). And even with those cards that isn't built for being used as hard drives it is remarkable how much faster they are then mech drives.

[BucklingSpring]

SDD are surely the biggest single step upgrade I saw in 20 years, well maybe the first 3d card versus a plain one was a comparable step.

I agree no question about that.
It's just that I have been spoiled with raided 10Krpm WD Raptors.

OCZ claims 740Mbs, the real life average is more in the 200's - Average HD is about 60 Mbs - so 3 times faster...
But for the same price as the Revodrive X2 I have 3 times the space and solid 200Mbs with my raided Raptors.
 
In couples of years, SSDs will rule the storage world. Right now, there are still many applications where the HD performs better at a much cheaper rate.

The main deception was from expecting 740Mbs and getting 200Mbs instead.

[BucklingSpring]

Hard drives remind me of PS/2.

 LoL - they are surely going to stick around longer than they should... Just like PS/2

[The Solutor]

I agree no question about that.
It's just that I have been spoiled with raided 10Krpm WD Raptors.

 

WD raptor were (and are) great disks, I used first a 36 GB one, then two 74 GB ones in raid zero, then briefly a 150 GB velociraptor. Almost 10 years of quick and problem free computing.

The intel SSD is still a big step, not just because the speed but also because the silence, my pc is now completely fanless and even a velociraptor wich isn't a loud HDD looked incredibly noisy in a completely silent pc.

OCZ claims 740Mbs, the real life average is more in the 200's - Average HD is about 60 Mbs - so 3 times faster...

Is not the transfer rate that makes a difference on an OS dedicated drive. It's the seek time and the  4k transfer rate, which averages from 0.5 to 0.8 MBps on a normal HDD, it's around 1.5 on velociraptor and 60 on my intel G2

[The Solutor]

I use CF cards as hard drive for all four of my Amigas and in my tmux/irssi server (Running OpenBSD). And even with those cards that isn't built for being used as hard drives it is remarkable how much faster they are then mech drives.

 
I have a custom linux distro installed on a 2GB RS-MMC (which is damn slow if compared with modern SD and uSD) thanks to the access time and the compression used by BTRFS it's still way faster than the one installed on a mech HDD on the same pc.

[noodles256]

i use a flash drive for storage. unmatched speed

[BucklingSpring]

WD raptor were (and are) great disks, I used first a 36 GB one, then two 74 GB ones in raid zero, then briefly a 150 GB velociraptor. Almost 10 years of quick and problem free computing.

The intel SSD is still a big step, not just because the speed but also because the silence, my pc is now completely fanless and even a velociraptor wich isn't a loud HDD looked incredibly noisy in a completely silent pc.


Is not the transfer rate that makes a difference on an OS dedicated drive. It's the seek time and the  4k transfer rate, which averages from 0.5 to 0.8 MBps on a normal HDD, it's around 1.5 on velociraptor and 60 on my intel G2

 
Wooohooo we're on the same page.

I really noticed how fast the SSD seek time are when I launch multiple concurrent and disk intensive tasks on it. Doing the same on my spinning drives simply bog them down to a useless point. I understand how quiet they are... But I can't really appreciate it since my GPU, CPU, PS and Case fans are as lound a monster truck.

[NeeGo]

Someone walked by me today and accidentally knocked my X200 off the desk. I had to make sure that the guy wasn't seriously injured from the incident.

[BucklingSpring]

Someone walked by me today and accidentally knocked my X200 off the desk. I had to make sure that the guy wasn't seriously injured from the incident.

LoL - Did it land on his foot?

[.XL]

LoL - Did it land on his foot?

Anyone who is dumb enough to knock a whole laptop off a table deserves whatever injuries come with it. Almost every day in class I have to deal with this idiocy...why can't people just take their backpacks off and hold them in front of them!?

[NeeGo]

LoL - Did it land on his foot?

 
Lol no, it was a failed joke. You know, the chances of him getting hurt is more likely to happen since ThinkPads are indestructible even in falls.

Anyone who is dumb enough to knock a whole laptop off a table deserves whatever injuries come with it. Almost every day in class I have to deal with this idiocy...why can't people just take their backpacks off and hold them in front of them!?

It's the combination of the laptop screen being pushed back at more than 90 degree angle + extremely tight aisle. So half of it is my fault for not closing the laptop which I usually do but for some reason didn't in this case.