I alluded to the fact that my new ThinkPad exhibits some troublesome new trends with the ThinkPad line.

Right off the bat I found a big trouble spot. The simple RAM upgrade process of the old ThinkPads (remove one screw, lift panel, pop in new RAM sticks, replace panel, replace screw) has vanished. Now, on the T60, one must remove 5 screws and the entire palm rest plastic. Lame. I hated unclipping that plastic panel on my minutes-out-of-the-box, spendy new ThinkPad. Not a terminal problem here, but this was SO MUCH BETTER in my old T30 and T42.

Next up: Battery. I purchased the 2326-D7U, which ships with a 9-cell battery. Excellent battery life, but it sticks out the back of the machine, not looking cool, and not fitting nicely into my Timbuk2’s laptop slot. No big deal, I’ll just order a 6-cell. Only there was no listing for a 6-cell T60 battery anywhere reputable (cdw, newegg, amazon). CDW has them now but they did not when I bought mine.

I bought my 6-cell from the Lenovo site, where it was listed as a T60/Z60 battery. I have a Z60 in the shop too, and the 9-cell battery in it has the same strange shape as my T60s (and it worked in the T60), so I ordered it. But when it got here, I find out that there is a little notch on T60 batteries to make them fit (apparently only on the 6-cells though). It was a tiny bit of plastic that I notched to make the battery I bought fit, but damn. Come on Lenovo!!

Third gripe: Power supplies. The sweet, ubiquitous 72w brick that I’ve come to know and love (and own like 6 of) has been replaced by a 90w unit with a new plug. Fire sale on 72w IBM power supplies!

Now, those are three pretty “every-other-laptop-except-thinkpad” traits, but I have been a ThinkPad fanboy in large part due to the interchangability of power supplies and ease of upgrading. So come on Lenovo, don’t make me start shopping HPs or some other bullshit.

Yeah, it’s been a while. I just haven’t been that inspired to write anything. Hopefully I can get back into routine of posting here.

Tonight’s topic: Vista. I finally have an Aero-capable machine in my new T60 2326D7U. The T60 is a great machine, but it shows where Lenovo is going with these….and the trends are disturbing. More on that later.

I installed Vista RC1 build 5600 today on a second HD in the Ultrabay expansion port. I like it overall, it is way more attractive than XP. I had not played around with any install of Vista until today.

It seems to work well, and it auto-installed all of my devices except the CDMA modem.

As I have read, it seems to mimic many of the visual enhancements built into Mac OS X over the years, like transparency and anti-aliased type. There are also things like the Windows Sidebar and its Gadgets (OS X has Widgets, though they aren’t anchored to anything the way the Sidebar is.

IE7 is much nicer than IE6, but it still leaves something to be desired for someone who has been using Firefox 2.0 RC3. The spell check function in FF2 is just too awesome to not be included in all browsers.

There is definately a lot of new, flashy eye-candy, and booting back into XP makes for visual disappointment. It’s interesting, and it will be fun to watch the improvements as MS rushes it to market.