Well, folks, here it is, my new laptop. Although technically more on the refurbished than the new side, nevertheless, it works quite well. It's an old Thinkpad, provided free of charge by the PLDT when my father signed up for mobile broadband internet. It was a little shitty before I refurbished it.
It's pretty small, smaller than my old HP-Compaq Presario M2000, as my new laptop has a 11" something screen while the former had a 15" LCD. Of course, weight is drastically reduced if you compare it to my old laptop. I'm guessing the x60s I'm carrying right now weighs a less than two and a half pounds, while my Presario M2000 weighs in at more than seven pounds. Seriously, it's difficult to walk around carrying that monster. Yes, the x60s is small, but it's no netbook. It's just an ultraportable.
Here's the specs of my laptop before and after I upgraded some shit:
Old
Intel Pentium Dual Core L2400 @ 1.66Ghz
1.25GB of RAM
50GB HDD
Windows XP Professional
New
Intel Pentium Dual Core L2400 @ 1.66Ghz
1.25GB of RAM
250GB HDD
Windows 7 Home Premium
As you can see, one unlucky trait this laptop came with when it was shipped to us was its incredibly tiny HDD. Sure, it was big enough during 2005, but this is 10 years later and two 32GB SD cards can easily overtake this shitty Serial ATA. I bought a new one, a 250GB one, since according to a bunch of people that's as large as this laptop can carry and to my father, as large as his wallet can carry.
Here's a general review of important parts in my notebook:
Processor
The processor itself is double the power of my old one, as they share the same clock, but my new one has two cores, so that's a plus. I experience less freezes, and the only moments I feel freezing is when the app I'm running was written by someone who alternates playing CoD:MW2 with coding.
Memory
The RAM inside my laptop is sufficient enough for not-so-powerful computing, and it's good enough since I'll just be using this for coding in college. 1.25GB of RAM is a bonus from the PLDT, since stock X60s's come only with 512MB of RAM. I'll plan to upgrade it to 2GB in the future though.
HDD
The HDD was downgraded to 50GB from the original 80GB by PLDT to compensate for the free huge RAM (huge during the time). Now 50GB seems ample enough for 2004, but these days, you can already buy a 32GB SD card for a not really high price nowadays. That's why I bought a new HDD, a 250GB Serial ATA to replace the HDD. It seems that replacing it was a breeze. I just had to unscrew the lid, and pull out the disk through its two rubber grips. Then the rest was easy.
Operating System
As a bonus, I bought myself a genuine copy of Windows 7 Home Premium, since my dad think we're building ourselves a "new" computer and trying out one of history's overhyped operating systems wouldn't hurt. So after installing a new, clean, and bigger HDD into the notebook, I inserted the Win7 HP 32-bit DVD into my notebook's external optical drive (it did not come with an internal drive, which is good).
While installing Windows 7, I was immediately impressed by the simplicity of the installation process. Microsoft has been true about their claims that even a Neanderthal can install Windows 7 on his computer. The setup was easily navigatable, and it contained useful guides on what the hell this button does, and what the hell that button does, etc.
After installing, and my computer was good to go for me to play with, I met all those overhyped "features" Windows fanboys acclaimed, like the Super Taskbar, the improved Aero, improved speed, improved everything, and whatnot.
Keyboard
Unfortunately, to compensate for the notebook's ultraportability, I was given a small keyboard, in fact, one of the smallest I've ever seen. The keys aren't really small, they're just as big as regular non-membrane keys, but their layout was confusing. I was used to the big spaces of my old laptop's keyboard, now it seems that the keys are more packed in than usual and there's the red trackpoint mouse protruding through the middle of the keyboard like a sore, red nipple. The backspace key was as small as any other key on the keyboard, and the only keys getting the "bigger than usual" treatment was the enter, tab, Caps Lock, Shift, and most importantly, the Spacebar key. I took a small typing test course to familiarize myself with the keyboard, and, after typing out a relatively long children's tale, I even managed to top my accuracy and typing speed from my previous record, the previous record being done on my old laptop. My old record was (by average) 88 WPM, 96% accuracy, while my new record was 90WPM, 97% accuracy.
Battery
The only thing holding out this laptop from being awesome is its battery. Since it's pretty old and the battery has been through a lot of discharges and recharges during its duty, it's capacity was reduced to 48%. I manged to do a couple of battery maintenances and calibrations, and managed to ante up the actual capacity to 58%. Still, 58% actual maximum capacity still qualifies as "poor", so I may need to replace the battery soon if I were to take full use of my laptop's ultraportability.
Overall
This is awesome. Good power and ultraportability, all in one package. This will probably live for me in about three more years before it dies out and make me decide that some poor fool in the Philippines will need it. Or I could just throw it in front of a moving train, which to me is more environmentally-friendly, and the laptop will find its way to a better place than in the hands of an illiterate who thinks CRT screens are better than LCDs.
