Sunshine State

I am off to zExpo in Orlando

Enjoy yourself down there buddy, it looks like a comprehensive set of education.

+++

Ah, the T60p. I use a T43p, but I do also have a T60p, it sits underneath my flatbed scanner and runs virtual machines under Ubuntu Linux. The virtual machines are running a mixture of Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 and various Linux distros under VMWare's (now free) Server product. Having a Linux hypervisor is good as you don't have to reboot it for "patch tuesday" from Microsoft, proving a level of stable uptime to your VM's.

top - 21:28:07 up 84 days, 23:16, 1 user, load average: 0.50, 0.51, 0.46
Tasks: 89 total, 1 running, 88 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.3% us, 3.0% sy, 0.0% ni, 96.7% id, 0.0% wa, 0.0% hi, 0.0% si
Mem: 2072836k total, 2024240k used, 48596k free, 24084k buffers
Swap: 3984080k total, 52332k used, 3931748k free, 1795776k cached

It's been continuously up for almost 85 days :-) (Note the SMP kernel for the Intel Core Duo in the T60p).

Why don't I use the T60p as my business laptop? Well, it's a little heavier than the T43p but the main reason is the power supply. For the last 5 years or so the power supply of a thinkpad has been interchangeable with the power supplies of earlier thinkpad models. But the T60p is such a power-hungry beast and the power supply for it is different from all those that came before. So now all my old power blocks - which seem to have proliferated to most rooms in the house - don't fit the T60p. So now when wandering around the house with a T60p laptop I also need to have it's power supply in tow. I got bored with that and leave it be now :-) Having said that the battery does last longer, but if it's on battery it runs slower to conserve power.

The other thing I noticed with it are some affinity problems, applications hanging unexpectedly being the result. I am sure these will get resolved with microcode/BIOS updates in the fullness of time however. All in all, a great machine.