For the past three years, I've been using a ThinkPad X40 laptop. My primary computers are desktop machines, so the laptop is used primarily for meetings, communications, office applications, and presentations. For these purposes, the most important features are (in order of importance):
The X40 nails all three of those factors, even today with its "antique" Pentium M processor. So when the MacBook Air was announced this month, I got a kick out of the pundits who decided it was lacking essential features. For comparison, here are some facts about my usage of the X40:
For me, and for 99% of my colleagues with laptops, the MacBook Air is lacking only one thing: a built-in ethernet port. But since I only use ethernet at my office desk, a cheap USB hub with ethernet dongle will work just fine.
The MacBook Air looks perfect.
My friend Don has updated the source code for his version of SimCity and made it available as an open source project named Micropolis. Electronic Arts generously made the source available as part of the One Laptop per Child project.
I am quite familiar with SimCity source code, and I'm sure Don's code is a heckuva lot cleaner than mine. I'm really tempted to do something with this… and if you can code, you should too.
Well, only a week after I "repaired" my old HP All-in-One, it started to make some impressive grinding noises that only stopped when I shut it off. Rather than spend more time on 5 year old hardware, I threw it out the window and bought a new faster and quieter HP Photosmart C5280.
I chose an HP brand All-in-One because of the excellent Linux support for HP printers and scanners. HP's Windows drivers are notoriously terrible, but the Linux drivers are simply a joy to use. In fact, if I wasn't using Linux, I would probably avoid HP due to the Windows driver issues, but hooked up to a Linux box, HP printers are the way to go.
Because I previously had an HP printer installed, setting up the new printer took all of 3 minutes. I just opened the CUPS configuration page (http://localhost:631), added the printer, gave it a network name, noticed that the model was autodetected by CUPS and the HP drivers (HPLIP), printed a test page, and exported the printer to Samba. I then went to the Windows machines, fired up the Add a Printer wizard, chose a Network printer, selected the new Photosmart in the list, and printed a test page. Done! Remote scanning works perfectly as well.
Initially, I noticed a lot of banding in the test pages, so I used the "Self-Test Report" and "Clean Print Cartridges" functions on the printer's Setup menu a couple of times. This fixed the banding issues, and now the quality is fine. For less than $150, I'm quite pleased with the Photosmart C5280.
