Laptop Keyboards

When I joined Sogeti I was fortunate enough to get a brand spanking new shiny Toshiba laptop. This was a couple years ago. I was thrilled to have it; it had a brilliant looking screen (and still does) and I eventually got used to it’s quirky keyboard layout over time. Throw on a USB Logitech VX Revolution external laptop mouse (highly recommended btw) and it provided everything I needed.

All this was back at a time that I suspect the company was between lease contracts. Everyone that came before me had a Thinkpad, and those that came a few months after me received Dells. People complained about the Thinkpads back then and they complain about the Dell’s now, which proves you can’t please everyone. There are likely only a handful of consultants in the company whom can relate to my Toshiba story.

Last year as the lease contract was turned over to Dell we also had the opportunity to purchase the old Thinkpads for personal use at a discounted rate. These were T41 models. I picked one up on the cheap and installed Fedora Core 8 on it. Now, now, this story isn’t about a Microsoft Solution Leader installing a Linux distro (some other time for that), however this story is about the clear superiority of the the Thinkpad’s design to that of Toshiba. The Thinkpad is lighter, the keyboard is leaps and bounds superior, and the eraser mouse in the center of the keyboard is quicker than an external mouse with almost everything. The ThinkPad is older than the Toshiba and it’s held up better, of course this may be from my daily use of the Toshiba for the past couple of years, but the IBM just feels like it’s better engineered.

I wish I could take the keyboard and light-weight of the ThinkPad and combine them with the screen and dual core processor on the Toshiba, but I’ll probably have to wait until the Toshiba rolls off of lease. This should be soon as you might be able to tell the Toshiba is starting to show it’s age. Hopefully I’ll be able to just dump all my current software over to whatever newer laptop I end up with.

From all the feedback I’ve seen thus far, I certainly don’t want a Dell with XP on it, so here’s hoping Sogeti let’s us utilize the laptop of our choice. I bet even some consultants would choose a (gasp) Mac. I’m wondering if Lenovo has kept the well thought out design and functionality of the ThinkPad line. My suspicion is that they probably haven’t in order to compete on cost, but I can’t prove that. If they have indeed preserved the solid engineering, then I’m all for another ThinkPad. In the meantime, FC8 runs splendidly fast on my T41. Just got done installing the developer version of Oracle 11g Warehouse builder on it.

((holy traitor batman!!…another non-Microsoft product!))

(I know, I know, but my roots are broad and as an principal consultant and architect, I’m all about providing the best solutions to customers given their needs whether that be Microsoft or something else. Staying abreast of all the available technologies, including open source, affords me flexibility of implementation. Really, more on that another time.)