Futureproofing (or at least resisting)

My 4.5 year old IBM Thinkpad X40 has now been replaced with a new, sleek HP Tx2z touchsmart tablet pc!  Not that I had any issues with the thinkpad except for XP dying almost a year ago.  Probably my fault for having it's hard drive completely stuffed to the point where it didn't have enough virtual memory.  Nonetheless, the thinkpad kept on trukin' after I installed Ubuntu 8.something "Hardy-Heron."  What was a slowish, thin, light, bulletproof ultraportable became a faster, more capable machine for another year.  I also experimented with solid-state memory, swapping the proprietary Hitachi drive out for an adapter that ate two compact flash cards.  Pretty neat, very quiet but my 4hours battery became a 40min battery at best due to solid-state requiring constant power.  I primarily made the switch because the little thinkpad even with Ubuntu running was unable to run graphics intensive tasks such as QGIS open-source cartography software, or edit large 12 megapixel RAW files from my Canon Rebel, and crashing every time I tried to run Flight Gear (open-source flight simulator.)

So now the trusty little thinkpad will become a backup to the new machine.  I must say I'm still really impressed with the quality of construction of thinkpads. They really should be called thinktanks.  Mine had survived drops, soda, extreme humidity, heat, cold, accidental power surges from Vietnam's 220 volts, sand, rice, ramen, and a New York City hot dog loaded with the works (i can still see little bits of dried up sauerkraut under the keys.)

So HP Tx2z initial impressions:
It's not so business looking.  A bit more plastic on the exterior, unlike the thinkpad's rubber coated titanium which I will miss.  But with PCs it's what's on the inside that matters.  I've built desktops for friends and myself 10 times since the year 2000 so I think I know what I'm taking about here.  Brands are all pretty much the same as the hardware is usually supplied by intel, ASUS, MSI, AMD, NViDIA, ATI, Toshiba, Hitachi, Seagate, Maxtor.....and I could go on.  So aside from the high gloss gray finish with interesting graphics, it's about the same size as the X40.  Still a 12inch but widescreen instead of the almost square screen on the IBM.  Keyboard is snappy, quieter than the X40's.  It has a touchpad which I loathe instead of the 'clit.'  I don't understand why more laptops don't come with 'clits,' they're faster, you can keep your fingers on the keys and move the pointer at the same time.  However the Tx2z's touch pad is pretty good and I think I'll get used to it.  It's got an interesting dimpled texture to it and it is recessed into the frame so your palm won't activate it.

One thing I do like the most with the Tx2z is it has an internal optical drive, so I don't have to carry around an external usb or ridiculous docking port if I want to rip a CD or watch a DVD.  As the title of this post suggests, I tried to futureproof this baby to the max.  That is I loaded all the RAM it could ingest all 8GB of it and the largest drive available, 500GB 7200rpm.  I'm just tired of lugging external drives around to accommodate my music and photos anymore.  I used to velcro an external HDD and optical drive with electrical taped usb cables to my X40 and it was just not backpack or arm friendly.

The ATI Radeon 3200 gpu is going to blow the thinkpad out of the water in terms of graphics processing.  I'm hoping that this will run QGIS or even ESRI Arc GIS without crashing and be able to use the pen input for map digitizing.  Also think running X-Plane 9 should be no problem so I can practice instrument flight for my instrument rating without paying for extra time in the sim or in the aircraft.

The dual digitizer display is something I'm not used to but so far it's pretty impressive.  Being able to use the stylus and fingers to execute commands is very useful.  Handwriting recognition is amazing compared to the old Palm V from '99.

I'm running windows 7 64-bit and it's pretty good.  I'm still in the process of deleting all the "bloatware" that HP preinstalled to "enhance" the user experience.  As soon 7 is fully configured to my liking, I'm going to partition the drive and figure out how to run Ubuntu 9 on it.  People on the forum are saying it runs great on the touchsmart but there's going to be quite a bit of tweaking and debugging involved I'm sure.

At the same time I've also gone ahead and installed google chrome to see what it's like compared to firefox.  (I'm using it now to type this post.)  So far it's very fast and I'm impressed.  Will probably wind up switching soon.  Other stuff I added are: GIMP and open office.  I forgot to order MS Office and don't think i will as I can't stand the cartoony GUI they've adopted for it.  I can't wait to resurrect my old external drive which has sat dormant in a bag since I returned from Vietnam in early 2008 to revive my old iTunes music library.  So much music that I have not listened too in a long time!

Well that's it for now.  enjoy the picture.