Welcome to a Laptop AC Adapter specialist of the IBM Ac Adapter
About a year ago I bought a Winbook Si (PIII 850, PCMCIA, USB, CDROM, etc.) used off of eBay to see whether or not a laptop would be useful to me and for limited use on trips home. It worked pretty well, especially after installing Gentoo linux on it to make it snappier and more work-friendly.
However, it started to die recently and when the CDROM died, I realized that it’s not user-serviceable. Even when stripping the laptop down, it was nearly impossible to get access to the CDROM to remove and replace it. I spent a week trying to figure out how to install linux without a CDROM and eventually ran out of time and cried “uncle.”
So, in the last week or so I set out to replace my laptop. After my last experience, I had a few important criteria:
The laptop must be as user-serviceable as possible, and
It needs to be of high build quality and rugged.
After much research, I settled on the IBM with adapter such as Lenovo Y510 AC adapter
, Lenovo 3000 AC adapter
, IBM lenovo 02K6900 AC adapter
, IBM Lenovo 310 AC adapter
, IBM Z60t AC adapter
, IBM ThinkPad E530 AC adapter
, IBM ThinkPad A20 AC adapter
, IBM ThinkPad T40 AC adapter
, IBM ThinkPad X40 AC adapter
, IBM ThinkPad R60 AC adapter
, IBM ThinkPad T60 AC adapter
, Lenovo N100 AC adapter
ThinkPad R series.
They have many of the same features as their more expensive X and T series but at much more manageable prices. What’s more, if you look on eBay, you can find IBM-recertified laptops with a 1 year warranty for well under $1000. Nice compromise between quality and price.
I use my laptop daily at school as a guaranteed personal work station with all the software I want on it. I dual-boot Windows XP SP2 and Linux Gentoo and use it for computational biophysics programming, scientific writing, web surfing, and teaching.
Here are my impressions thus far:
1.Build Quality Is Excellent: Even while being much lighter weight than my previous laptop, it feels much more rugged. I’m not worried about biking with this in my backpack. The screen has a lot more structure to it (so it doesn’t flex when moved), and the rest has similar quality.
2.Battery Life Is Good: I consistently get 3 hours+ of usage even with the Wifi on.
3.LCD is good: Although it’s 1024 x 768 and 15″, it feels substantially brighter and more crisp than both my wife’s 15″ laptop LCD (Compaq) and my desktop 15″ Samsung 151v LCD.
4.Hard Drive Protection: This model not only has a hard drive housing for shock protection, but also active drive protection: it has an accelerometer that can detect bumps or a laptop drop and park the hard drive platters. The IBM software that runs it is adaptive, in that it can figure out if the bumps are small and repetitive (such as in a jet) and ignore them. This depends on Windows software and won’t work in linux for the time being.
5.Wifi Reception Is Very Good: It has its antenna built into the screen, and I can pick up networks reliably with it that I couldn’t with my older PCMCIA-based Wifi adapter. Connections aren’t dropped and speeds are reliable. What’s more, I’ve gotten the Wifi to work with the ipw2200 driver in linux Gentoo without any problems.
6.Extra Goodies Are Good: It has (among other things) a small built-in LED light to give a little extra light to the keyboard if you’re typing in the dark, extra hard drive shock protection, and active drive protection as mentioned above. It also has some of the extra features that should be standard on laptops but often aren’t:
1.Function keys to turn off the LCD (save battery power and have some privacy when you hit the restroom at Panera)
2.Turn the Wifi On/Off with a keystroke (save battery power when you’re offline)
3.Adjust screen brightness