New toy

My previous laptop was due for a replacement. It's not that old yet—only two years—but it was getting on my nerves. The (second!) battery only gave me 45 minutes anymore, the wireless had issues, and I never really liked the processor—note the lack of the VT-x extension; at the time when I bought this laptop, I wasn't aware of the fact that Intel was segmenting their products based in processors with and without hardware virtualisation.

Originally I was going to buy a Toshiba R700-14J, but after I'd been waiting for far too long, it turned out that it had been EOL'd. So eventually, I succumbed to the dark side and bought me a Lenovo Thinkpad X220 instead. I've never been a fan of thinkpads before; I don't like what they look like, especially not the earlier models. But since I didn't want to wait a very long time again, I decided to go instead for a model that my suppliers' extranet site told me they had in stock, which kindof limits your options.

The model I got is one with an SSD, which is new for me. I'd previously been holding off on getting an SSD until the technology had matured a bit, having heard some horror stories in the past about how some earlier models would run very slow after a while, but I guess it's safe to say that kind of problem should now be past us.

It's crazy how fast this SSD is. The original 5 second delay which grub implies almost doubled the boot time. I notice that the 'networking' initscript no longer waits for a DHCP request to complete, which has the rather funny result that sometimes when I log in, I don't have networking yet, which means that libpam-krb5 can't do it's job properly, yet.

There's one thing I'm not very fond of, and that's the display aspect ratio. 16:9 is just wrong. While I still prefer 4:3, I can live with 16:10. Very unhappy about that. There are still some laptops available that do have 16:10, but that would've required me to wait, which I didn't want to do anymore...

Oh well.