3 Strange Things I Found on the Internets Yesterday 17 years, 3 months ago by Martey Dodoo
I am not sure why the webmaster for the Cambridge music venue T. T. the Bear's Place feels that they are competent to tell me what Internet browser I should be using when they cannot spell, have not realized that using Internet Explorer 5.0 is akin to directly sending all of your banking information to someone in Eastern Europe, and their entire website is created with Flash, which is cross-platform and cross-browser.
Not happy at the selection of IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads on the special Harvard website[1], I have been looking elsewhere for the laptop that I will possibly/most likely buy in the next year (the fact that my T43's warranty runs out in April 2008 - more than a year away - has convinced me that 3 year warranties are too long for my liking).
Since I am still a fan of the Thinkpad, I have been browsing Lenovo's "normal" website. I am especially interested in the Z series (especially as the T60s seem thicker than the T4x series, despite the fact that they weigh the same); I like the idea of having a 14" widescreen laptop with Firewire and a SD card reader.
Regardless, I was a bit surprised when it came time to select the operating system on the Z61m that I was configuring (it was the only Thinkpad I could find with a screen resolution above WXGA and an integrated Intel graphics card; if this machine did not exist, I am fairly certain that I would go with a Latitude D620 - my problems with Dell in the past be damned). Windows Vista actually costs less than Windows XP. Even stranger, Vista Ultimate is the exact same price as Vista Business and Vista Home Premium.
After pricing a Thinkpad Z61m and a Latitude D620 (much lighter, much more expensive - especially after adding accidental protection), I decided to check to see if any OEMs that pre-install Linux could offer comparable prices. This was not so (issues of scale, I guess), but I was a bit surprised by one of the Google advertisements that appeared when I searched for "linux laptop." Since Dell offers the same craptastic Linux support ("we don't care if you use it, but we are not going to make it easy for you to do so because there are too few of us and Microsoft will kill us if we do so") as other major OEMs, I am not sure why they are advertising in the top position. I suspect that it may have been a mistake, since it no longer appears there now. I clicked on the ad just in case, but all they were offering were laptops preloaded with Windows XP Home or Media Center. Bleh.
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[1] Since a majority of my readers will not be able to access this site, here are some of my grievances: Where are the Core 2 Duo processors? Where is the announced X60 tablet? If integrated graphics give more battery life, why do all of the high-end Thinkpads have discrete ATI cards? Why can't I get the same customizations as on the regular Lenovo website?