Tower Of Power

Holy crap my ThinkPad T61 got here FAST!

Lenovo informed me on Wednesday that my laptop was shipped, cool right? Shipped from Hong Kong. I had 2 day shipping so sweet, I get my laptop on Friday.

Nope, Thursday morning. At 10. A.M.

First thing I did of course was completely obliterate vista (I downgraded to Vista Home Basic to save $45 bucks since (a) I have a copy of XP Pro and (b) I can get a copy of Vista Ultimate through A&M if I so choose).

One snag is that XP hates AHCI mode for SATA (won't even see the disk at all), though when I get the Intel Matrix Storage Drivers installed I could turn it back on.

Sadly XP Pro doesn't have any drivers on a fresh install to do anything of value on the laptop, so a quick CD burned with the LAN and WiFi drivers along with the "ThinkVantage Update Center" software and .NET 2.0 redistributable gave me everything I needed to install ALL the drivers.

Seriously, Lenovo, I'm actually impressed with your "craplet" software. It gets the job done WELL (the update center is AWESOME for getting all my drivers setup). Granted it runs a ton of processes, but I haven't noticed any lag in my performance (though we'll see how my battery stands up).

One thing I must note thats interesting is after all the pictures I was expecting the 6 cell batter to stick out the back. I didn't like this so much, but I had come to terms with it and moved on. But, Lenovo's website LIES. My 6-cell doesn't stick out the back (unless its a 4-cell that's been mislabeled...). Weight is amazing, and its a lot smaller than I was expecting.

So far I couldn't be more impressed with this laptop, other than the off center screen.

Next step: ThinkWiki shall aid me in getting Ubuntu setup on this machine and purring like a small kitten.