iThink I'm a real computer...
Mar 17 '00 (Updated Aug 18 '00)
Well for my high school graduation I decided I was going to ask my parents for my own computer. The decision was between getting a desktop or a laptop. Since I would be commuting to college I figured a laptop would be a great idea. Unfortunately I was wrong. I should have listened to the salesboy at the computer store who said that he bought a laptop for college and it lived in his closet.
I got a Thinkpad i Series 1412 in June of 1999. I paid about $2100 for it with the warentee and a carrying case. It came with a Celeron 366mhz processor 32 MB's of ram (unlike the description provided by epinions), and a 4.6 gig hard drive.
Problems:
There are many things I dislike about this computer. One big problem I have is with the mouse & keyboard. A lot of times while I'm typing all of a sudden I can't type. I have to shake the computer a little bit then it will be okay. Also the mouse will click on random things. For example while I'm typing this epinion twice the mouse has moved my cursor to other parts of the text box and I'll start typing there.
One of the big things that IBM markets with the thinkpad, is the fact that you can play CD's while the computer is off. Well the buttons for this are in the front of the computer, and they're very touchy. If you ever sit with your laptop leaning against you the buttons get pressed and this big CD playing program opens up on top of what you're working on. Plus the sound in my Discman is much better than the sound from the computer. I wound up uninstalling the software because it was annoying.
Another thing I didn't realize until after I bought the computer is that it has a winmodem. That that's fine for the average thinkpad user, but if you want to use Linux, you can't get online with it. This is probably my fault for not doing my research ahead of time about this aspect.
Conclusion:
I really wished I had purchased a desktop. For the same price I could have gotten a much faster system. In the year that I've been going to college, I only actually brought the laptop with me twice.
Update August, 2000
I recently had an experience with the tech support that I thought I would bring up in this article. When we got DSL at my house, I needed to get an ethernet card for the laptop, to hook up to our home network.
After using the ethernet card for a couple of days the PCMCIA slots stopped working, as well as the sound card, and the keyboard mouse problem became unbearable. (We assume this was some sort of power issue, but no one knows for sure). So I brought it back to the Best Buy where I had purchased it, and a three year warrantee. Of course, the Best Buy techs could not fix it so they sent it to some place that they contract with. These people could not fix it either, so it was eventually sent back to IBM.
Over a month later I got my computer back. The problems were fixed, but no one knew what was done to fix them, this irritated me. I suppose the one month delay can't be blamed on IBM, because before they even saw it, it was shipped around to other places.
The moral of this story is if your computer is still under IBM's warrantee send it directly to them, don't bother with the store you bought it at.
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Member: Pam
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